Abstract
This chapter maps out four influential positions in the sociology of morality taken by Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, and Marx. These authors’ differing substantive claims about morality are understood in terms of their differing epistemic strategies, fundamental conceptual assumptions that frame sociological inquiry. Epistemic strategies, most often divided simply into holism and methodological individualism, are here classified according to Kontopoulos’s five-part scheme based on the extent to which the theory in question invokes emergent phenomena, features of social life irreducible to individual action. Weber’s methodological individualism frames a subjectivist account of personal values. Simmel’s compositionist epistemology, which proposes institutions and relations irreducible to individual action, grants morality a limited objectivity that develops historically through the growth in scale of social groups. Durkheim’s holist epistemology frames a moralizing sociology in which moral questions have scientific answers, derivable from knowledge of the objective mechanisms of social integration and solidarity. The hierarchical epistemology of Marx’s thought is centered on a view of society as a strongly emergent but self-contradictory system of relations; complete moral integration is seen as impossible within a class society, so that the answers to normative questions vary by one’s location in class relations. Each of these four classical theories relativizes morality, but in different ways and with differing effects. In the fifth epistemic strategy, heterarchy or tangled-systems theory, sociology is reflexively implicated in the social relations it studies. The implications of heterarchical reflexivity for the sociology of morality are sketched briefly at the conclusion of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
As Margolis (1978) points out, this polarization reflects efforts by logical empiricists and other analytic philosophers, such as Dray, O’Neill, Popper, Suppe, and Watkins, to label as “collectivist” all positions other than strict methodological individualism. In this discourse, methodological collectivism was supposed to have an affinity with political collectivism, and methodological individualism with political individualism, so that the debate over emergence in sociological explanation carried resonances of the contest between Soviet communism and American liberalism.
- 2.
As an aside, I believe that Kontopoulos’s five-part levels-of-emergence classification is a more robust way of framing differences among theoretical projects than the scheme presented by Collins (1994) which has become dominant among introductory textbooks, which divides sociology into three main traditions: functionalism, conflict theory, and interactionism. For instance, Kontopoulos’s scheme recognizes, as Collins’s does not, the fundamental differences between Marx and Weber, given that “‘conflict’ and ‘contradiction’ are not, after all, synonyms” (Ramp 2008:149), and recognizes the ways in which Marx’s theorizing is more similar to Durkheim’s than to that of methodologically individualistic conflict theories.
- 3.
Weber’s methodological statements in this text may not do justice to the full range of his methodological practice. Weber is, famously, interested in the unintended consequences of intentional action. This comes across vividly in Protestant Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism, in his analysis of how the meaning and consequences of Protestant concern for material success from a “light cape” to an “iron cloak,” from a means of spiritual salvation to conformity with capitalist imperatives to produce and consume. A social dynamic informed by ‘unintended consequences’ is at least weakly emergent, so in practice Weber supplements his individualism with compositionism. Kontopoulos observes that there are degrees of methodological individualism (Kontopoulos 1993:85); Weber admits some emergent phenomena for pragmatic reasons but insists that the task of science in principle is to reduce these to individual action.
- 4.
This principled insistence on thoroughgoing reductionism carries over into Weber’s distinctive methodological concept, the ideal type. Weber characterizes the concept of “ideal type” in this way:
“For example, the same historical phenomenon may be in one aspect feudal, in another patrimonial, in another bureaucratic, and in still another charismatic. In order to give a precise meaning to these terms, it is necessary for the sociologist to formulate pure ideal types of the corresponding forms of action which in each case involve the highest possible degree of logical integration by virtue of their complete adequacy on the level of meaning. But precisely because this is true, it is probably seldom if ever that a real phenomenon can be found which corresponds exactly to one of these ideally constructed pure types” (Weber 1978a:20).
Elsewhere, he describes ideal types as “constructed concepts endowed with a degree of consistency seldom found in actual history” (Weber 2002:55).
- 5.
Or not explicitly. Boudon, in this volume, argues that a cognitive theory of values is implicit in Weber’s theorization of value-rationality.
- 6.
Although “methodological individualism” and “holism” are widely recognized terms for the epistemic strategies they connote, there is no established terminology for differentiating the positions in between these two poles. Kontopoulos actually uses the terms “constructionist” and “compositionist” interchangeably to refer to strategies, like Simmel’s, that posit emergent structures without positing the synthesis of those structures into further emergent systems. However, the term “constructionism” can also refer to a more specific project within sociology (Berger and Luckmann 1966) or to a range of positions in philosophical thought (Hacking 1999). I have chosen to use only ‘compositionism’, because it lacks these overlapping or extraneous connotations, and because its root suggests an apt image: of society formed as the composite of many particular structures, each of which nevertheless retains its distinctiveness and relative autonomy.
- 7.
It refers, at the same time, to the existence of a relationship as concrete interactions. Simmel sometimes characterizes sociation in what seem like strikingly different terms – such as “the life of groups as units” (Simmel 1950:26). Expressions like these cohere with the conception of sociation as social relations because Simmel constantly stresses that his synthetic concepts go both ways: the individual derives their social existence from groups, but groups derive their existence from the interactions of individuals.
- 8.
For an example of this relativizing tendency in Simmel’s own work, see his discussion of value in The Philosophy of Money (Simmel 1990).
- 9.
In this regard, Simmel’s work foreshadows the stance of postmodernists (e.g. Rosenau 1992) who treat subjectivity as determined by emergent social forces that themselves are undetermined by any overarching systemic logic. The implications of this view for normative questions, and by extension for moral questions in particular, are declared by Lyotard (1984) in his famous analysis of the condition of scientific knowledge in a world without metanarratives.
- 10.
It is important to be text-specific on this point because the methodology that Durkheim used in his actual studies is more complex than the one laid out in the Rules. For example, in the Rules Durkheim states that one should always characterize social facts by their “external” characteristics (Durkheim 1982:75), and one should never seek to explain social facts in terms of psychological mechanisms but only explain them in terms of the operation of other social facts (Durkheim 1982:134). However, practice Durkheim often does incorporate subjective perceptions and motivations into his sociology (Durkheim 1979, Durkheim 1995). To borrow a phrase from Friedland and Alford (1991), subjectivity and individual action are “recognized empirically” but “disappear theoretically” in Durkheim’s work.
- 11.
So, famously, crime is normal, even though (and precisely because) it is everywhere forbidden (Durkheim 1982:97–104). The existence of crime expresses the presence of (a) communal distinctions between allowed and prohibited conduct and (b) the existence of varying dispositions among the members of the community, both of which Durkheim claims are necessary to social life as such. Therefore, too little crime is equally a symptom of social pathology as too much.
- 12.
This high burden of proof might help to explain why Durkheim failed to incorporate feminist thought into his analysis of moral individualism (Kandal 1988, Lehman 1995, Pedersen 2001, Sydie 1987). That is, perhaps Durkheim was unable to perceive women’s struggles for emancipation as having the sort of critical mass indicative of a transformation grounded in the very nature of modern society, and so felt justified in ignoring it as a pathological symptom of anomie.
- 13.
This is an oversimplified image, however, because it leaves out the lateral relations among modular subsystems at the same level of emergence.
- 14.
Marx never suggests that all social conflicts result from the contradictions of the class relation, or that a communist revolution would create a society without conflict.
- 15.
For all the criticism that Marx heaps on capitalism and capitalists, as a class and individually, it is important to note that he also praises them as a revolutionary force in human history. The most conspicuous example of this occurs in the Manifesto (Marx and Engels 2000:486–489). A passage in the Critique of the Gotha Program gives a sense of the quality of what we could very advisedly call Marx’s moral judgments: “The bourgeoisie is here conceived as a revolutionary class – as a bearer of large-scale industry – relatively to the feudal lords and middle estates, who desire to maintain all social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production. [...] On the other hand, the proletariat is revolutionary relative to the bourgeoisie because, having itself grown up on the basis of large-scale industry, it strives to strip off from production the capitalist character that the bourgeoisie seeks to perpetuate” (Marx 2009:29). The class solidarity of capitalists is revolutionary as long as it works to dissolve the “fixed, fast-frozen relations” of the feudal order, and reactionary whenever it stands in the way of proletarian revolution.
- 16.
The disjuncture between the, as it were, synchronic and diachronic aspects of Marx’s theorization of normativity explain the difficulty, noted by Ollman (1976) of reconciling Marx’s principled critique of moralism with his abundant use of moralistic-sounding praise and blame in discussing not only concrete social conditions but also competing social-scientific accounts of society. That which is practically mistaken or self-defeating, for a movement to supercede capitalism, is by the same gesture a kind of moral failing. Abolishing the distinction between practical success and moral virtue cuts both ways.
- 17.
This is not to say that biological and cognitive factors play no role in heterarchical theories. Indeed, they may appear quite prominently. However, their significance is changed. As long as the individual subject was thought of as a bounded, coherent whole, then evidence for the causal importance of bodily mechanisms counted as evidence for the determining effect of the individual’s biological nature as opposed to their social environment. In heterarchical theories, this ‘nature vs. nurture’ opposition need no longer obtain. Instead, cognitive, organic, and even genetic factors can appear as factors in social systems, albeit not as simple one-way sources of determination, but as factors whose operation and consequences are themselves affected by systems of social interaction. Fausto-Sterling’s (2000) discussion of the complex relationship between genetic sex and embodied sex exemplifies a heterarchical approach to the subject.
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Powell, C. (2010). Four Concepts of Morality. In: Hitlin, S., Vaisey, S. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_3
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