The Sociology of Class and Domination

Abstract

The foundations of sociological theory were laid down in the work of Durkheim, Weber and Simmel. For these sociologists the object of study was industrial society and particularly the problems of social cohesion, legitimacy and democracy. They were concerned with the conflicts and tensions generated within civil society by bureaucratisation, rationalisation, alienation and rapid social change in the transition from preindustrial to large-scale industrial, urban communities and cultures. Social development was analysed in implicit dialectical terms: increasing social complexity, autonomous individuality and richness of culture on the one hand, collectivism, conformity and sterile, calculative culture on the other. Society was theorised both synchronically and diachronically; society was a structure loosely integrated around values and human action. Weber, Simmel, and to a lesser extent, Durkheim, in examining society as a structure and as a process involving active human subjects, were led to explore the objective, institutional, basis of authority and domination in its bearing on human action.