Which do you think matters more, race or class? Why? Does the answer vary according to racial group?" Please explain. Be sure to refer to at least two of the theorists. Have you experienced racism? What happened? What did you do? What would one of the theorists you read for this week say about how you responded? How would you reply to him or her

#1 “Which do you think matters more, race or class? Why? Does the answer vary according to racial group?” Please explain. Be sure to refer to at least two of the theorists.

#2 Have you experienced racism? What happened? What did you do? What would one of the theorists you read for this week say about how you responded? How would you reply to him or her?

Required Text:
Lemert, C. (Ed.). (2013). Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings (5th ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Sources:
• “William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois,” Lemert, p. 126
• “Double-Consciousness and the Veil,” Du Bois, in Lemert, pp. 126-130
• “Martin Luther King Jr.,” Lemert, p. 263
• “The Power of Nonviolent Action,” King, Jr., in Lemert, pp. 264-266
• “C.L.R. James,” Lemert, pp. 314-315
• “Black Power and Stokely,” James, in Lemert, pp. 314-319
• “Elijah Anderson,” Lemert, pp. 488-489
• “The ‘Nigger Moment’ in the Cosmopolitan Canopy,” Anderson, in Lemert, pp. 488-491
• “William Julius Wilson,” Lemert, p. 496
• “Global Economic Changes and the Limits of the Race Relations Vision,” Wilson, in Lemert, pp. 497-499
• “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” McIntosh, Peggy:http://www.deanza.edu/faculty/lewisjulie/White%20Priviledge%20Unpacking%20the%20Invisible%20Knapsack.pdf

• LECTURE:
Race and Racism in America
Race is a touchy subject in America because, starting with the mass genocide of Native
Americans, racism has deep roots in our soil. For hundreds of years, slavery existed in
America which was based on the belief of the inferiority of African-Americans. The
legal system in America fortified the racial dictatorship. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution
defines slaves as subhuman, as 3/5s of a person. To this day, well into the 21st century,
we are still arguing about affirmative action, equality before the law, racial equality, and
other related issues. Race matters, and all the more so when we try to pretend it doesn’t.
Before we go any further, it is important to define some basic terms. What is race? Race
is a socially constructed category that is intended to group individuals according to
observable differences. The term race also refers to groups of people who have
differences and similarities in biological traits deemed by society to be socially
significant, meaning that people treat other people differently because of them. Both of
these definitions draw attention to the socially constructed category of “race.”
What is racism? Racism refers to the belief that one race is superior to another as well
as the practices that institutionalize this type of oppression and racial inequality. What is
discrimination? Discrimination can be defined as granting particular privileges to a class
arbitrarily designated from a sizable number of persons, where no reasonable distinction
exists between the favored and disfavored classes. What is affirmative action? This can
be defined as a policy or a program that seeks to redress past discrimination through
active measures to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment. What are
reparations? Reparations refer to the act or process of making amends.
Whether race matters depends to a large extent on one’s knowledge of history as well as
on one’s selection of race as a socially significant topic of discussion. How race matters
differs for each major racial group in the U.S.: Native Americans, Latino Americans,
White Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans.
Does race matter to you? Why or why not? Which do you think matters more, race or
class? Why? Does the answer vary according to racial group?

• Lecture:

SOCU 450 Salon 3, Mark, Weber, Durkheim

>>: Recording. All right. So for those of you listening to this recording, welcome. This is our third salon. It’s a discussion of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. And participating in this discussion today are Professor Myron Orleans and Professor Christopher Davidson and myself, Professor Lata Murti. So we’ll begin right away with question number 2. We’ll have Professor Orleans go first in answering each question, then we’ll have Professor Davidson give a response. So let’s start with Weber distinguishes his work from that of Marx or Durkheim and why?
>>: Well, I a major quote of Weber that has pretty much stuck with me, although I don’t have the text in front of me is the definition of sociology; and he looks at sociology as a science, as a science that provides causal explanations for social action. And although that seems pretty barebones, what it implies is a neutral prototypical scientific study as compared to Marx’s concept of materialism and objectivism, which is really, excuse me, kind of like Fox News version of truth and news. It’s entirely a bias version that favors his proclivity which is ideological toward Communism as he depicted it. So the way I look at it, the quotes that could be juxtaposed are quotes of Marx which are pseudoscience and quotes of Weber, which are pseudoscience.
>>: I have some questions about that but I know
>>: Sure. I know Professor Davidson is going to have something, so I want to hear from him first.
>>: I am, well, just for starters, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a reading by Marx.
>>: I’m somewhat familiar.
>>: Yeah, um, I beg to differ with Professor Orleans of pseudoscience. I think he’s not giving Marx enough credit. Marx was very, although he did clearly state his I mean he was clearly an advocate, a scholar advocate, and he envisioned a future in which there was a society of each according to his ability, where everybody attributed according to their abilities and took according to their needs and so on; and he was a scholar and he was there in the past communicate of 1870 when there was a real experiment with Communism. And he was the he was quite aware that the Paris Commune was a failure in not being able to establish and have any staying power; and he talked about why the Paris Commune failed. And one of his famous quotes was “history does repeat itself.” The first time is a tragedy, the second time is a farce; and he was referring to the King of France. I think it was Louie Bonaparte, you know, who is, I think a nephew of Napoleon and he was talking about the 18th Brumaire, the culture, he said at first, culture was a few U super structure and didn’t have any of its own staying power that what really matter was material interest; and that, you know, he thought the workers would rebel because they didn’t have any other choice that that was the only path forward. And he later recognized in his analysis of events around Paris Commune and the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, sometimes people don’t act according to their own economic interest; and they respond to ethnic identity, to charismatic leadership; and he he said that he talked about a group called the proteriate, a group of young men who supported the regime and offered prestige and respect as soldiers of the king. And he basically said the reason that the Paris Commune didn’t survive is the workers didn’t have enough popular support. Even though they were representing the interest of workers as a whole, they didn’t have the support of all of the working class because a lot of the working class didn’t really believe in Communism. They believed in respecting authority and tradition and their traditional leaders and especially in the case of kind of the proteriate that he talked about, there was also an army of unemployed young men who had a direct economic interest in defending the king, they also wouldn’t have survived, they wouldn’t have won the battle against the workers except there wasn’t a lot of support.

[Telephone ringing].

>>: Sorry. That was my phone. What I take from that is Marx was a social thinker as Weber was and he was willing to recognize his ideal stages of history wasn’t actually what happened in practice.
>>: All right. Okay. Good. I know that Professor Orleans has going back to his point about science, can we say that Weber is more scientific in the way he approached science? Professor, what would you say?
>>: Exactly, Lata, I agree with Chris that that Marx was a social thinker. He was a very good analyst of capitalism of economic flaws and social flaws and its social consequences. On the other hand, his analysis was directed toward the creation of an alternative state which was a figment of his imagination which his image of Communism even as Chris said and it’s great to debate with you Chris, I love it. But I want to go back to what Lata said that Weber was actually a founder of sociology of science along with Durkheim, those are the two major figures in using theory on an empirical testable way rather than use theory as an advocacy for an alternative regime. If you want to look at social theory, I think we have to look at Weber and at Durkheim; and if we want to look at social advocacy, social philosophy, social projectionism, I think we look at Marx. In fact, I don’t see any projection in Weber. He was an an list of society and Durkheim was an analyist of society. This is what we do in sociology, anthropology, psychology, we now have a social and behavioral science where we try to use theory in relation to data; and we’re not making grand projections of what we could would like to see, we might have recommendations of what we like Durkheim did with suicide and I’m struck, we’re talking today after evidently this actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman might have committed suicide, intentionally killing himself with drugs; and we want to understand problems like that as crime rates, poverty issues, Marx certainly does help us when we look at poverty. Anything about the actual functioning of Communism is is even as Chris said, Paris Commune failed, its been a human tragedy and having visited many communist countries in recent years, I was struck by the pathos of Communism and the success now of China is because it has totally abandon Maoism and Communism and any kind of connection to Marxist ideology and same in Vietnam and Marxism applied; but it is it is actually quite ludicrous, excuse me, as a country, quite pathetic in fact. I’m a great fan of Marx as an analyst as capitalism and Weber and Durkheim as social scientist as we want to be; and those are the two individuals I look to emphasize in contrast to Marx.
>>: Christopher, you you have an emphatic point to make here. Why don’t you unmute and make it in response to what Professor Orleans said. You have typed it in the chat pane as well.
>>: I think Marx, Marx never expected that his idea would be used as an ideology for a state socialism. That wasn’t his vision. He saw, when he discussed, when discussed his vision of, you know, the progress of the movement, he said that the state would act as a transitional sort of authority that would redistribute the, you know, capital and from the capitalist class to the power of the people. It wasn’t Marx who came up with the idea of the proteriate it wasn’t Marx who dictatorship that we saw in the countries that you mentioned, North Korea, Russia, any of them. He I think he was quite he was off the mark when he expected the revolution to in the most advanced governments and [INAUDIBLE] would respond to um to, to the socialist movement by putting in a welfare state. That wasn’t that was a surprise to him; but he certainly didn’t think that, if he’d actually lived to see what happened in Russia and in, you know, later in the Eastern Europe and North Korea or China, I don’t think he would have even recognized it as anything remeetly the society he was imagining. If anything.
>>: Ah to go on.
>>: I was thinking he might have been more sympathetic to Israeli [INAUDIBLE] which were a closer approximation of what he viewed to communist society and [INAUDIBLE] have had their problems too; but I don’t think they involved dictatorship and cultive personality at all.
>>: Yes. I can see your points on both sides from the both of you and was that a plane going by?
>>: Yes. I’m unfortunately near the airport. I unmuted my mic.
>>: I wanted to make sure.
>>: But allow me to allow me to state that there is a comment of Marx about the dictatorship of the proteriate withering away as a transitionary state of socialism toward Communism and this is the problem of Marxism. The problem of Marxism is that his theory is based on trust and optimism and a favorable image of human nature, which is all good things; but not in line with what we experience. In reality, no government disappears or dissolved, it just doesn’t happen. No people in power give up their power purely as a matter of moving toward a next stage, you know, we we flower children of the 1960s or grandchildren of the 1960s would like Marx to have been valid; but there was no way from the beginning. One of the elements in Marx that I find very concerning was his trust in human beings based on Rousseau’s belief in positive human nature and the thing about Weber and Durkheim is that they don’t have these kinds of trusting images of people. They are really looking at social institutions and social institutions not only bind individuals together in Durkheim and structure the social actions of people in Weber; but they provide the context of real life and that’s my message about where we are looking toward the future of social science, behavioral science, a science of reality and not of projections that are based on unrealistic images of human nature and the human future. As much as we would want to have an anarchic society of liberated individuals who will be socially responsible and love each other as kind and caring neighbors, this is just not going to happen. It doesn’t happen. I say this because I live in a fine community of loving, sweet people in this area I’m living in in Las Angeles. And this is a community social context and social forces and this is why we look to Weber and Durkheim to what we do today and what we do tomorrow in social sciences.
>>: I’m glad you brought it to Weber and Durkheim. I want to call the viewer’s attention to the comments since we did discuss Marx in an earlier salon; and, Professor Davidson, if you can just move until I’m finished. So we don’t have the echo, I’d appreciate it. There are a couple things that I’ve grabbed on to from what you’ve both said, particularly from what Professor Orleans said, you mentioned there is objectivism along with the material in Marx’s analysis and objectivism is very scientific. So how do we explain that? And then in thinking of, I also thought of Rousseau when reading Marx, then going to Durkheim; so it occurred to me that we’re thinking of Marx being positive and optimistic and Durkheim and Weber being more analytical of the problems that exist; but then when you think of Durkheim as a functionalist and thinking that um that yes we have these periods of enemy. We have this disorder, if I’m interpreting Durkheim correctly; but we always come become to this equilibrium, we find something that works and is functional then is Durkheim then being unrealistic with that? I mean any less so or more so than Marx? Or is my interpretation off? And Christopher says it’s because because Durkheim was just as starry eyed as Marx and didn’t realize the possibly of conflict between social classes; so I’ll let you both respond to this. I’ll let Professor Orleans go first.
>>: It seems to me that we exercise functionalism as essentially Durkheimian; but he was looking at adaptive potentials of society. Society is a very vibrant, ongoing processes; and I think that’s much in tune with reality. We keep engaging with problems. Chris emphasizes how Durkheim doesn’t look at social classes, and I think that’s true that he doesn’t emphasize conflict of classes. And thank goodness we have the Marx’s analysis gross social inequality and increasing social inequality; but I think that what we see in Durkheim that I find very instructive and very beneficial for us because we are living now in a time where so many people are talking about the disintegration and degradation of our society and all of this doom’s day junk that being, we’re being misled to believe in. I’d say we’re not doing great; but we’re muddling through and getting by and striving toward improvement. I say this as the market seemed to collapse today and I lost so much money. This is February 3 we’re talking about. I think I’ll get the money back tomorrow; and if I don’t get it back tomorrow, I’ll get it back next week. The thing about Durkheim, equilibrium is eventually attained and and tie that into that whole dynamic view of late 19th century science and the adaptation was so important and in a certain sense that’s kind of optimistic. But I think it’s a very mild optimism where we say we’ll do well, the society will survive. And I encourage especially our young students in our class to not fall into the ideology of the disintegration of America and the world and that somehow terrorism will destroy us or we are doomed. Obviously, this has been such a cyclical process; that we are now on a downturn moment, actually in an upturn of the downturn. We’re coming back up quite a bit, actually in very recent time; but we need to look at a future and Durkheim and Weber give us tools to analyze that future and Marx is telling us what that future should be and will be. And I have to disagree with this notion that it’s objective in his words but not in his analysis. All he’s saying is that you have to look at the world from the Marx’s prism. And you will inevitably come up with a conclusion that a proterian is inevitable. And that’s his objectivism but it ain’t so. So I turn it over to you guys to further this analysis.
>>: Okay. All right. Professor Davidson’s fingers are burning there, typing; so why don’t you unmute and respond to that and at the same time if you could give us your favorite quote from Durkheim so we can turn the focus to Durkheim, that would be great.
>>: All right. So what would you like me to do first here?
>>: Respond. Yes.
>>: All right. So I’m just sort of looking at what I wrote here; and first of all, Professor Orleans was talking about how, you know, in the Durkheim, in Durkheim’s vision of the world, societies obtain equilibrium and break out of equilibrium and come back to equilibrium and there’s something dynamic about society engaging with its problems. I would actually suggest that that’s not always true that societies don’t engage with their biggest problems most of the time, in fact, they keep on cycling back to them over and over again. The United States has always had greater income and equality in Europe, at least in recent times, even though it maintains a fiction of being, you know, they we’ve tried to maintain the fiction of being the classless society or mobility and it’s easily to be upward mobile in Canada than in the United States. We’ve had a problem with inequality for decades if not centuries. Russia still faces the centralization of power and Moscow of the Kremlin and the society of czars. I’m not saying some societies don’t change. There are some societies that change dramatically. [INAUDIBLE] the idea that society let sides are so self correcting, I I don’t think the evident points in that direction. I think that inequalities get reproduced, you know, from generation to generation and sometimes amazing ways. Now, the other part is, okay, you mentioned the doomsdayers, the US society’s disintegrating and so on. I agree with Dr. Orlean Professor Orleans isn’t particularly productive, especially for our students who are hoping to move up in the behavioral, better their circumstance, and so on. My interpretation of the doomsdayers, when we have people clamoring, saying our policing the boundaries between polite society and between respectable society. And you know the rebels on the outskirts, so to speak. Durkheim talked about how crime was a way, crime had its own function, which was to, you know, illustrate what was acceptable; and what wasn’t in a society and in every society that definition changes. There’s acceptable in one society that isn’t acceptable in another. Saying good people don’t good won’t don’t, for example, I don’t know if either of you watch Downtown Abby, for that time to take [INAUDIBLE] Abby serious, good respectable women didn’t go around having sex when they wanted to they wanted and so on; and if a woman wasn’t following those precepts, she was considered outside the bounds of respectable society. But it’s not like that stuff didn’t happen. It happened all the time. I think that sort of, to say, when when people say the society’s disintegrating, they’re saying the rules are changing. And I don’t get it anymore. The boundaries of what’s polite and what isn’t are shifting. And then I said also define equilibrium. I think that’s the thing. Equilibrium can exist in many different ways. I mean you could have an equilibrium in a society where social inequality is, you know, huge. And you can equilibrium in a society where there’s a lot more, a lot more equality. And on this, for example, there’s a lot less income and equality in Japan or Germany than there is here and than if you look at people, if you look at the average middle class person in those countries, they denied it be a little less, a little less trusting of government, a little more trusting of their neighbors, a little more than we are here in the United States, instead of undermines trust. Oh, you wanted me to offer some Marxist hypotheses for the future. Great. I will. Are you aware of a book by Thomas Piketty that’s coming out in the next few months? I’m going to type the title here. It’s coming out in English in March, and it’s already been published in France. Thomas Piketty and he analyzed he has this 00 years of data that Marx didn’t have and his argument is that over time capital, the return on capital is much higher than the return on economic growth and there is this inevitable tendency in a society for wealth to concentrated at the top. I think Marx, Marx was sort of making that point too. He expected, he ecological expressed hope that there would be a revolution; but in reality, his data showed only that there was increasing inequality and that it seemed to increase and got deeper and deeper into society and the only thing that reversed was an effective attempt by governments and Borgia sie to forestall revolution. That was why Bismarck put in social security? Germany but on the other hand, I don’t know, don’t you think Marx would have been equals he might have been surprised by World War I?. Yeah. I don’t think he would have been predicted different capitalist nations going to war with each other; but I do think that a Marxist hypothesis about the future would entail the ever sort of growing power of capital and of capitalists; and I think that’s the basic prediction that he made, which, I think has been borne out over the last 200 years, you know?
>>: M hmm. Okay. Um, very good, I saw on the chat pane that Professor Orleans wants to respond and when you are done with the response, can you answer number 3 Professor Orleans if you see it on the screen. The most important that student should take away from Durkheim and Weber.
>>: Chris, it’s just wonderful talking to you. We’ve got to get together. We need some time. Sit at StarBucks or coffee bean or whatever, it’s too exciting to just stop today. It seems to me there’s a cyclical pattern going on here; that is, if you look at the recent, say, hundred years of America, you see movements back and forth and degrees of inequality. In the 1950s, we started moving toward greater inequality; and in the ’90s, there was a further exacerbation of inequality. And now we’ve reached a high point of inequality in our society. That seems to have generated a counter reaction. It seems now the democratic party is basing its future on the notion of reducing inequality. President Obama has been dedicated to this. His state of the union, just the other day, his message to the American people, rebuild the middle class. This is the trajectory that he’s trying to move. It doesn’t mean it’s entirely successful. But my argument is, one major movement toward inequality, produces raising of the tax rates and limitations of the truly wealthy and powerful as we’re seeing today. I don’t know how successful it will be, but it will be a struggle. Now, the benefit of Marx is look at the struggles of and this is why what I see in Weber also, the struggle that Marx saw as ending mythical; but the struggle that he depicts is real and effective; and it’s our job as social scientists to study the ongoing conflicts in society and adaptations that happen continuously; and in order to do this, we have to get rid of two concepts. One concept is that we’re going to end up in a Nirvana and a heaven of perfection and everybody’s going to love each other and the one where we’re going to end silly and fun science fiction movies. Neither is going to happen. We’re going to keep on going with struggle, and that’s going to be our future and that’s fun. That’s feen. We have to live with conflict. We have to embrace conflict, love our opponents, deal with our opponents. We just lost excuse that plane we just lost Nelson Mandella; and, of course, have so many heros of struggle that have given us inspiration to keep on going with the good fight, recognizing we’ll probably never win but probably never really lose. Durkheim has requested, the contribution of Durkheim, the area I feel is so good is basically, not only is he a fine sociologist of structure and function as we’ve mentioned but the relationship of the individual to society is very important in his work and I think very destructive for us, especially those of us involved in the practical real world, which I am not, because I’m living in Marina Delray, it’s too good here. Too much like Marx’s Communism. Anyway, the idea of the individual and the need for society to constrain, regulate, and channel the individual. We have to understand Durkheim as a kind of counter Freud and even as a counter Marx as a person who focuses on not allowing its individual to go in his own direction, which is kind of an egoistic concept that he emphasizes in suicide as a road to ruin for the individual and for society; and he ties this in, of course, to an owe me, distinguishes the two, which is always tough for students to grasp the distinction of an owe me. To me, an owe me is a weakening of social norms and then the reinforcement of society by the reaction as Chris mentioned to the outliers to kind of constrain and restrain and we have this going on right now in the struggle over the legalization of drugs, criminalization to what to me one dash maybe that explains the too much recreational marijuana in that environment, although society Seattle is not such a constrained society itself. in the work of Durkheim and we see this as thematic.
>>: You said regulation is a keyword, and it shows up in the readings. I marked it several times, that regulation; and we hear that they owe in our financial world, we have over the last five years, regulation being a deword, which I think is very very Durkheimian, regulation and social responsibility.
>>: The thing I Marx that I like haggle a notion of a dialectic, we don’t have a linear transformation of society or even cyclical as I mentioned before, but there’s conflict and transformation an that’s the way our society goes and we really need to kind of keep that dialectical process into mind with regulation of the individual and lesser regulation and more regulation and there will be this continuous struggle as we go from one point to another point and another point and the dynamism of society is what holds out promise for our young peer people rather than the notions we’re going to achieve perfect or deinvolve in utter and complete misery, the dialectic keeps on and we will keep on in the struggle process.
>>: Professor Davidson, what would you say in response to that and important lessons from Durkheim? Can you hear me?
>>: Sorry. My mic was off. Can you hear me?
>>: We can.
>>: Um, okay. So my understanding is you were talking about that you were sort of saying the Durkheim sore of captures the struggle following his or her inclinations an being regulated by society. I mean that’s certainly I he talks about the metaphor of the body and the soul as being our metaphor, the way we divide between our individual and inclinations and society’s imprints on us and what I actually find most compelling about the composition is the collective forms of identity as basically society working its way into our, you know, deepest, deepest parts of us and in our most private moments of our lovers, we’re still influenced by society because we’re still accenting by social expectations. He defines religion as society worshipping itself, which I find extremely power. I think in that sense, it does sort of distance him somewhat from Marx and Weber, if only he’s talking about society is existing independently of the individual. I mean he’s, I guess Marx does talk about social forces, but he thinks basically that economic is the only social economic material needs is the only social force worth mentioning; but for Durkheim, societies exist for their own personalities an their own demands that they put on people and that every time we do anything in a group setting we’re participating in society and entering a form of, you know, entering a different world, a differ experience that we have as individuals I always think of how you know, teenage boys have the reputation of accenting very differently when they’re together with each other than they do when they are one on one. It’s almost as if the just the presence of 12 teenage boys in one room they agree each other on. They’re performing for each other. It’s not just boys. It’s true about any group, I think. In society, we act very differently than we would act in private.
>>: Yes. Yes. Professor Orleans says we can bring in Weber on that in the object at this if I indication of society so I’d like to hear that from Professor Orleans. Those are great points that you made.
>>: Yes, the die cot any of Durkheim and Weber on this is very exciting for me, they are talking about the creation of society from individuals an the creation of individuals from society, sort of reciprocal influence, reciprocal dialectic, we want to ask in a social political class, how does the society come about, how does the individual come about? How can we have the individual interacting together and how do they in a fused manner create a state that regulates the individual and the individual participates in, this interaction between individual and society is very exciting in the foundation of social and political theory and both Weber and Durkheim comment on this and we certainly also get in in the notion of Marx, tying in the concept of alienation and self estrangement, so all those things tie together. Distinctions are interesting. It seeps to me that from Weber, we find the foundation in the individual and the project outward, the creation of organizations with social entities from individual subjective orientations and as Chris says from Durkheim, we get it more from the collectivization of the consciousness of individuals in this Unity and this thing separate from the individual that regulates the individual and from Marx we get the notion of alienation and in my mind the fundamental meaning of that in the early work of Marx, the economic and fill so much cal manuscript is the projection of man’s production, a human being’s production, to a world its own.
>>: I think that’s really important. Can you repeat that? I’m sorry to make you do that; but can you repeat that, maybe in fewer words. You are saying each theorist is talking about the relationships between vegs and society but each take a different approach. Let’s start with Durkheim. Durkheim’s approach is.
>>: Durkheim’s approach basically is social structure, religion, collective consciousness precedes individual construction.
>>: And then Weber.
>>: Individual consciousness precedes the construction of the social order.
>>: Okay. And then, lastly, Marx.
>>: Marx is basically, humans produce the collective structure through their own labor. Maybe is more than working with your hammer. It’s if I may give a point, there will be a new Frankenstein movie coming out and we have to understand Frankenstein as a kind of metaphor for the social theories of the era, well, actually, Mary Shelley preceded all these theories the notion of humans create their social order and then their social order takes on a life of its own and then regulates the individuals. Our product becomes, maybe in Marx, our oppressor, and maybe in the others, our product, our construction; and the key thing that I think that sociology can contribute and social science can contribute to our general understanding is that it’s our construction. We constructed it. We actually constructed ongoing, many of the current sociologists argue, through our interactions, we continually reproduce society, Chris said this earlier in terms of inequalities, and class differences, we as we communicate and exist in our classes and our work lives and our families and we’re creating our families as our families create us and this is an ongoing dynamic. And this is thematic through all of sociology; and it’s the fundamental theme and social science and social psychology, anthropology, they all have these themes in common as their foundations. And once a student grasps the integration of the whole, you have a nice view of what’s going on in the social world.
>>: Very good. So. So sociology in 5 minutes from Professor Orleans. Very good. I want, Professor Davidson to address it from number 4, to be the most difficult reading. And so what have you found students struggle with the most reading Weber? And what do you struggle with the most? And why and how? How can we address that struggle? How can we lessen that?
>>: I’ve noticed with the spirit of capitalism, some students misconstrue Weber that the best capitalists are religious Protestants and good people are capitalists. I want to stay right out front, is really what he’s really talking about is the persistence of ideas beyond their original identity that he argued that the prophetic instead of hard work is a way to get closer to god, maybe what motivated the earliest capitalist or earliest pro capitalist or the Calvinist and Holland or what have you, what happened is when the when the Calvinist and the Puritanists built institutions such as churches that were men to sort of give, give structure to their belief in the redeeming power of hard work, what they ended up doing inadvertently was to create profits that were stored away because they they believed that it was unChristian to spend money and to to show your wealth; and they didn’t see them as profits at first; but they were able to produce things at much more efficiently because they weren’t wasting much money and the fact that capitalism Americans out of that, the idea of profits and saving as investments and so on was an accident but people, the mechanisms that the Puritans and capitalists developed, the Puritans and Calvinists their wealth that they didn’t want to spend, changed, became less religious; but the institutions were still there and because the Puritans were so efficient with their work. They forced Catholics and other non Puritans to compete with them according to very different rules. Instead of lords displaying all the wealth that they’d accumulated, we realized we’re going to go out of business because the Puritans are going out of and we also have to invest and save and we also have to make, have profits to keep hold of our profits and when he talks, he talks about the iron cage as basically the echos of a long gone set of religious beliefs. People don’t even know those beliefs necessity more but they still act in way that’s are consistent with them, the quote there is, I think, very famous and I’ll see if I can find that for you. Just a minute. I’m sorry. The spirit of capitalism, the iron cage. It’s page 104 on our reader here. This is the reader, right? That’s the book that we’re using, yeah? Is this our book? Um; so so what he said is that well, I don’t want to waste too much time here, the Puritan, okay, here, I got it. The Puritan wanted to work at a calling. Here, forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of man as tick cells into it did its part in building of the modern economic order, this order’s now bound of machine production, which today determine the lives of all individuals that were born into this acquisition. With require resistible force, last ton of fossilized coals burned. Like a light cloak which can be thrown aside at any moment; but fate decreed that the iron cloak should become an iron cage. That’s the quote that sort of cap occurs that iron cage idea. It ties into one of the key differences of Weber and Durkheim which is that Durkheim saw society separate from the individual and accenting independently whereas I think Durkheim would probably have argued that charismatic leaders and their beliefs at particular times in history can then exert their own logic, the societies can often trace their origins back to, you know, individuals in the past who had power and who built institutions that sort of expressed their view of the world. And when charismatic leaders come to power, in times much trouble and rapid social change, they can have an immense influence on the that they built up and the through structures become the new normal, even after the charismatic leaders died; so society doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s often constructed by individual leaders.
>>: Very good. I didn’t realize I was muted there earlier, I was responding to you; but just so you know, you’ve got the 4th edition there, Professor Davidson. It’s the same thing in the 5th edition. I just put in the chat pane the page number. Professor Orleans, do you want to respond in terms of question 4? Would you reading Weber, understanding his views on capitalism and
>>: Well.
>>: And what were you seeing students struggle with the most with Durkheim and why?
>>: I think that most students seem to enjoy aren’t I on? I think I’m on. No? You hear me?
>>: Yes. We hear you. We were muting ourselves so there’s no echo. We can hear you.
>>: I think most students enjoy reading Durkheim as they get into it. It fits in with certain predispositions as Chris said the emphasis, it resonates with a lot of our students. Weber as Chris said is very easily misinterpreted as religion causes this or that and cultural politics cause this or that and that he’s the anti Marxist. It’s just not true. Weber is much more to do than anything to do with Marx’s offering a much broader perspective. And what he’s trying to do is interlink multiple factors and show how each factor plays a role. It’s like a multiple regression of foundation for the social sciences. He’s trying to show how religion plays its role and culture plays its role and government plays its role and very important in central economics plays its role. He’s tying in multiple factors and showing how these multiple factors play out in the dynamics of society. He’s not offering any grand theory of although Chris captured a lot of the social change that Chris captured the social change in Weber that emphasizing in trouble times, charismatic leaders can create foundations for institutions that then become organized and become the structures of ordinary, ongoing society. Also, Weber emphasizes the creation of organizations and bureaucracies as we have known them and the concept of organizational structure is very potent in understanding our social order now; and this should resonate with the experiences of our students; but the language of that Weber uses, the complexity of sentence structures and its Germanic foundations make it difficult; but the ideas are very powerful, very emotional and compelling. And we talk about in the iron cage, it’s open to so many different interpretations, including the repression of human emotion, much human sexual, of human sexual, [INAUDIBLE] if you will, by organizational structures by bureaucracy, the restraint on humanization, the limitations on humanization and then the counter challenge to that, many of our students might be connected with the organizational leadership program and studies of organizations and Weber has so much to offer there that is brought into the literature now and kind of taken for granted in the literature but originated with Weber, the notion of on the one hand, bureaucracy’s being the most efficient means of organizing society; on the other hand, it denies human impulse and freedom and pure human relationships; and, of course, we have to understand that the Weber is talking about something really a little bit complex, not something about reality but about how to analyze real. I think a message that I got in my undergraduate studies a century and a half ago from Weber was what you need to do in social science is develop analytical concepts that enable you to study real and measure reality and that’s the ideal of ideal type and as Chris discussed, another ideal type might be bureaucratic organization and many students might conflate bureaucratic organization as a concept with it as a reality. Any real organization must be analyzed using the ideal type; but the ideal type itself is not a description of actual organizations. We need to do is use the concept to each the degree to the extent to which reality is understandable.
>>: (Loss of audio).
>>: Very good. Excellent. And um and I know Professor Davidson has a couple of things to add; and I know the switch from metaphor from Weber is very important to him. I know he’s mentioned it to me before, then add on to [INAUDIBLE] since that’s what Professor Orleans was talking about.
>>: Any yeah. I’m really glad you brought up ideal types. The reason I mentioned it goes back to Plato, in this course, we read Plato, our students think is Socrates; but it’s Plato. And it’s Plato who developed this first idea in the republic, talked about this sort of perfect society and I think that there’s some family resemblance to Weber’s a perfect model, a model of society; and, you know, there’s sort of an ideal type bureaucracy and ideal type he talks about different types of leaders and different types of religions and different types of organizations and so on, and although no organization in the real world is exactly like any one particular ideal type, the ideal types are lens are a way to evaluate what the organizations are actually like. I think the difference is for Plato are, the goal was to approach the ideal type, where I think Weber was just saying they are a tool of analysis, I think it’s also important to talk about Marx or Durkheim, I think they were both idealist in a way they believed they were a way to make society better. He was always a skeptic and he talked about the and science and how he was a scientist and social scientists should maintain their distance. Right. That’s exactly what I was going to say. I thought maybe deep in his heart of hearts, Marx didn’t believe he would see Communism in his lifetime. He would say the ideal society is one in which people got, you know, contributed according to their abilities and take according to their needs in which you can hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon in which there’s the government is crumbled because there’s no need for it and so on. See, I think it’s helpful to keep that communist ideal in mind if for no other reason, it does give us something to work toward even if we never get there. I think that’s a very important difference I believed that with the proper tools of analysis, we could come up with a perfectly functioning society. I mean he didn’t actually come out and say that; but he did say individualism is a new way to hold society together, a secular religion, a greater organic solidarity, in his professions as a new form of collective consciousness, very concerned with making society work well and presumably, what Durkheim would have said was ideal, a perfectly well oiled machine where everybody was doing exactly the right job with the right amount of enthusiasm so.
>>: So what would you say students struggle with the most in Durkheim? Is that the functionalism?
>>: I would say probably the problem with Durkheim is that I think, the way he speaks, the way he writes, it sounds like he’s sure about everything. In suicide, for example, he basically, he has a, it’s a very, it’s a monograph, a very interesting use of data; but people think that his explanation is the only right one, you know, because the way he represents it. The better point, whether or not it was actually true that Catholics committed suicide less than Protestants they tried to hide evidence of suicide. The point to not to be taken literally; but his way of approaching a problem as useful, looking at the day you and trying to put a, use it to establish, to testify a hypothesis. I’m not sure students will get that unless you point it out that suicide is a model for how you can conduct research as much as it is a I found that um, you know, when I’ve taught suicide in other courses, at Excelsior College, in an intro soc class, they actually go and look
>>: I’m sorry. I’m going to have to stop you there. I just realized I’m running out of battery power. Keep talking and then maybe you can address number 8 there if you can see it, talking about Durkheim and address number 8. I’m going to be right back with a plug in for my computer, so take it from here, thanks. Sorry.
>>: Okay. I was going to say the intro to to actually research suicide statistics in their own home states with they actually test, they took at Durkheim’s and so on. What’s interesting, they very effortlessly slide in a suicide, people who are depressed or socially isolated they, and I think what think find, what’s useful in Durkheim for them is a way to think about suicide that they haven’t thought about for is predictable for different reasons an it occurs in different social settings.
>>: (Loss of audio.)
>>: I’m going to stop you there if you don’t mind because students don’t actually read suicide in this course. They read about it in the sociology course, 420, deviant behavior is where a lot of students encounter Durkheim in terms of suicide, while all of what you’re saying is important and students who are watching and listening to this, keep all of this in mind for the 420 course. In this particular course, students are reading an excerpt and labor. And what I marked in that reading, is Durkheimian and distinguishes us from Marx and Weber is first when this is, I think is a powerful statement right here on page 60 in the 5th edition of the text in the second column in the middle; but only social rules can prevent abuses of power. It is now known what complicated regulation is needed to assure individuals economic industry without which their liberty is only nominal. He was talking about this new, I’m assuming he’s talking about this new economic order after the industrial revolution and about capitalism and how rules an regulations need to be in place for individualism even to still exist. Am I right there? You can type in the chat pane; and then toward the end of that excerpt on page 61, um, the very end, he says the absolute all economic discipline did not fail to, in this way, first I should say in this way with recognition and rules the absence did not fail to extend its effects beyond the economic world and consequence weaken public I should restate that. If we keep going I suppose in the way we are then the absence of all academic discipline cannot extend the effect and weaken public morality but the evil observed, what is its cause and what can be its remind? And the excerpt ends there with um with a question; and, yes, I see what you’re saying there, Professor Davidson. He’s advocating for the rule of law and against corruption as well. So I think for the students in this course, those are important quotes to grab on to for Durkheim and certainly relates to what he writes about in suicide; but I did want to, unfortunately end our discussion of suicide there because that’s something our students don’t read for this course and read more in the sociology of deviant behavior course and hopefully can apply in their criminal justice courses as well. So I’m glad you agree those are important quotes. Because we are running out of time, I want to end our discussion with number 8, which we’ve already been kind of been doing all along; but in the final essays, students are asked to take a current social problem and offer solutions from different theorists; so um, why don’t we take a social problem from today and then what solutions Marx, Weber, and Durkheim would offer to the problem. With this question, I’ve been rolling around our current state of class warfare, if you will, the 99 percent verses the 1 percent; and occupy Wall Street and what solutions or what analysis even would Marx, Weber, and Durkheim offer to that and the strengths an weaknesses to each or mass unemployment, I think, goes hand in hand with that. Let’s go with mass unemployment, I think that’s more specific. Professor Davidson wrote it in the chat pane and then we’ll end the salon there. Do you want to start then, Professor Davidson, since you offered the social problem?
>>: Sure. So I you know, I can’t in my mind separate mass unemployment from a couple other problems which I think are related. And so, I think, mass unemployment is partly due to um automation, you know, increasing technological advances that are making a lot of jobs, middle class jobs redundant and then the other part of that problem is the inequality of income which is bad for the economy because is it reduces the command. If all the wealth is concentrated at the top of society, then the entire middle class stops buying things; and you see that already with all these middle class restaurants that are going out of business like Red Lobsters or Sears and this sort of, you know, rising housing costs and expensive parts of town and expensive parts of the country, excuse me. So long with mass unemployment has a lot to do with income inequality because if there’s a lot of people spending money; there’s a lot more jobs; and if there’s a lot more jobs, then you don’t have unemployment anymore. There’s three factors, automation, income inequality, and mass unemployment, and the fact, also, as you get more automated, all the wealth from the machinery, those own the robots and machines and so forth are the ones would get all the profits because they’re spending less on labor. I think that’s the problem. I don’t know if you guys agree with me or not, actually, I should stop to ask.
>>: Yeah, I would agree; and I’m interested now in the analysis you would give from each of the theorists; but you’re, I had trouble hearing you there toward the end.
>>: (Loss of audio.)
>>: Already. Thank you very much for your contributions today. This was wonderful. I’m glad you could join us. Take care. Professor Davidson, let’s finish up by having you respond to what both Professor Orleans said and to question number 8 and we’ll end there. And you’re still muted. So.
>>: All right. How’s that?
>>: Good. I’m gonna
>>: Okay. My sense is that Professor Orleans was talking about, you know, as as as sort of the old jobs disappear because of automation, we create new jobs that don’t need to be automated that aren’t so allow to people to keep working. I don’t have any to speak with that. I think you have to keep into account, somebody’s going to pay, somebody has to be willing to pay people to do those things; and when you have a situation where, you know the people number of people in the labor force has fallen considerably in the last few years, it seems like every month it new jobs are coming in are not the same type of jobs before the recession. They’re more low pay, more temporary, less skilled to a large degree; so if we agree that the problem we’re facing now is that, I think the estimates now are maybe 15 percent of the population is either 50 percent of the working age population people who would have been in the prime working years have either left the workforce or have been looking for a job without getting one or are working part time when they’d rather be working full time. That’s a pretty that’s a very high number when you’re talking about the when the recession was supposed to have ended and its been five years since the beginning of the crisis. I think some of the examples that why it is why we have fewer jobs, automated checkout counters, you know, floods of amateur photographers on instagram when we used to have people who were hired to do it. In a few years we might have driverless taxis an driverless trucks. And adjunct faculties are taking its place of in classroom faculty because of technology. I I I think that basically it’s hard to argue with the idea that automation has reduced the need for labor in certain areas and because of that, less money’s going to pay workers; and more is going to pay capitol like computers and so on that do the work that people used to do. What that means if you own capital, stock, you are in good shape; but if all you got is your labor, you’re not. So if I if we, let’s see, what would Marx say to this? He would go back to his original point, welt in a capitalist society, welt consists in the means of production; so if we, you know, if we wanted to if we want to bring a huge part of this disenfranchised poor people into the economy, they have to have the means to do that, they have to have their own means to do that, their own cars, own homes, they can put on its mark. Sharing an economy is a good example of what this might mean. Where people can rent out their homes to visitors; LIFT, this new online service with car sharing service; you can be hired on the the spot to give people lifts. Those are examples of what Marx might suggests making regular people in a means of production. If so much wealth is in the form of in the form of equity, ownership of stock and stuff, then redistribution might mean that everybody, even poor people get to own some of the stock in companies, even if they don’t, even if it shouldn’t be just capitalist who own those resources. Weber, um, let’s see, I think, okay, so, so, Professor Orleans mentioned the importance of charismatic leadership. What may be missing is some sort of organizational heft among people who are left out. They don’t have anybody supporting them, they don’t have anybody no alternative to the existing state of affairs; occupy was an attempt in that direction, but Weber would have laughed because they actually deliberately tried to avoid any kind of charismatic leadership. They made their points and went home and what was left? A couple of phrases here and there like the 99 percent and the 1 percent. So I think if it would have been Weber, I think he would say great, now that you have occupied, let’s come up with a leader, build institutions; but a problem of the occupied don’t believe in occupying.
>>: Also come up with an ideology. Would you say that too?
>>: There was an ideology, I think, basically, we can exist independently of capitalism. I think, they were passing around, remember, the height of occupying, there were people bringing food, people camping out in tents, people helping out each other. I think what happened was there was no institutional structure to maintain at that ideology. Nobody came in with billions of dollars saying, here, go, I’ll give you a piece of land; and you can start a commune; and so I think it might be that they just didn’t have the leadership to make those kinds of demands. He also, I think, Professor Orleans also mentioned in a Durkheimian world would say the society’s out of equilibrium that we should through government regulation and so forth, you know, replans things so that the wealthiest people are supporting the poor; and I think that’s the closest that we’ve come do a solution that when Obama gets up and says something in the State of Union speech, he’s going to use executive powers to say increase the minimum wage, he’s taking a very Draconian approach because that’s what’s available to him. I’m not sure that I agree he’s a charismatic leader. Charismatic leaders come from outside the system. He’s from inside the system. If Obama were still a community organizer, he could tell people, let’s try this and try that; but instead he’s working from within the power structure. He can’t be charismatic. Upsetting the balance of things. So um, the strengths, I think that the strengths of the Marxist approach is it’s trying to put power in the hands of people who don’t have it. I think that the problem, I think, even though there’s some ways for wealth to be redistributed, you still will have a whole legalism in place that have have capitalism, you can’t have people seizing factories and robots and so on. I think the problem with Weber, I think we saw the problem with Weber, in order for it to work, you have to have people stepping up to the plate. You have to have the right leaders at the right time; and we have not had that, effective charismatic leaders and maybe the part the reason that’s true is because everybody’s a leader. Each wants to it’s almost like we’re too individualistic because of the days of the charismatic leader are gone because of a worldwide trend of individualism and greater questioning authority. I think Weber didn’t realize how much questioning authority would become an ordinary part of life. He had no clue that would happen. He believed people were wired to be respect authority, and I don’t think that’s true. I think the problem with Durkheim is there’s a glimpse of what you can do if you are operating within the power structure, you can’t really upset or make any great changes because there’s too many forces waiting you in. That’s my take on it.
>>: Excellent. Thank you very much. All right. Its been an excellent salon. I am going to end the recording here unless you have one more thing to add.
>>: Nope. That’s good. Thank you.
>>: Okay. Of course, thank you.

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