Seminar: Topics in European Social Philosophy – Dr Carl Humphries

6. Post-Romantic German social thought (early neo-Kantian/sociological thinkers, the Frankfurt School)

  • Georg Simmel (1858 – 1918)
  • Ferdinand Tönnies (1855 – 1936)
  • Max Weber (1864 – 1920)
  • Herman Schmalenbach (1885 – 1950)
  • Frankfurt School – Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969), Max Horkheimer (1895 – 1973)

Introduction:

Origins of sociology as a discipline/field of scientific or quasi-scientific research lie in C19th French thought:

  • Auguste Comte (1798-1857) – positivist
  • Émile Durkheim (1858 – 1917) – advocate of hypothetico-deductive method in the social sciences

German social philosophy evolved as a kind of philosophical sociology at the end of the 19th century:

  • Influenced by neo-Kantianism as a reaction against Hegelianism and Romanticism, but also influenced by Marx (and thus Hegel), and Romanticism (especially Nietzsche)
  • Neo-Kantians stressed the limits of empirical factuality, emphasized the idea of a general a priori commitment to the systematicity of knowledge, and took seriously both differences and connections between the physical and the human/cultural sciences, etc.

Simmel, Tönnies, Weber and Schmalenbach were philosophers who sought to define sociology as an empirically researched discipline from a philosophical standpoint reflecting Kantian and/or Neo-Kantian methodological concerns:e.g.

  • methodological rationalism
  • a priori sociological truths, etc.
  • cf. psychology as an emerging empirical discipline, and the issues related to psychologism that led to analytical philosophy and phenomenology

A) Social/commercial origins of modern individualism (Simmel)

Simmel discusses social structures, focusing on the city, fashion, money, and modern society

  • some similarities to the analyses of Durkheim (problem of individual and society), Weber (effects of rationalization), and Marx (alienation)
  • society = an association of free individuals
  • society cannot be studied in the same way as the physical world
  • sociology more than the discovery of natural laws that govern human interaction.

Society is made up of the interactions between and among individuals, and the sociologist should study the patterns and forms of these associations

  • emphasis on social interaction at the individual and small group level, and viewing the study of these interactions as the primary task of sociology makes Simmel's approach different from that of earlier writers

Simmel began his inquiries from the bottom up, observing the smallest of social interactions and attempting to see how larger-scale institutions emerged from them:

  • he often noticed phenomena that other theorists missed
  • e.g. the number of parties to an interaction can affect its nature
  • the interaction between two people will be very different from that which is possible in a three-party relationship

As a group grows in numbers and extends itself spatially, its inner unity loosens, allowing much greater possibility of individual freedom and flexibility, with the common culture and form of association greatly weakened.

The metropolis or city becomes the location where the division of labour is the greatest and where this individuality and individual freedom is most expanded.

Modern culture in terms of language, production, art, science, etc. is "at an ever increasing distance." This is the result of the growth of the division of labour and the specialization in individual pursuits that is a necessary part of this:

  • subjective culture is "the capacity of the actor to produce, absorb, and control the elements of objective culture. In an ideal sense, individual culture shapes, and is shaped by, objective culture.
  • [but]objective culture comes to have a life of its own – spirituality and value are taken out of the hands of the individual, who becomes like a cog in a gigantic social mechanism

Simmel returns to the individual, analysing how the individual deals with the developments of modern society, and considering how the individual personality is developed in these circumstances:

  • one way individuals assert a personality is to "be different," to adopt manners, fashions, styles, "to appear concentrated and strikingly characteristic"
  • obtaining self-esteem and having "the sense of filling a position" may be developed by seeking "the awareness of others."

The personality is not an isolated entity but also a social entity, one that depends on interaction.

  • social interaction, looking to the reaction of others, and seeking the recognition and awareness of others is an essential aspect of individual personality

The intellect and personal psyche develop in a different way in traditional and in modern society:

  • In rural and small town settings, impressions of others are built up gradually, over time, on the basis of habit. Many of these impressions are less conscious and are built on more deeply felt and emotional relationships.
  • In contrast, in the city, there is sharp discontinuity, single glances, a multitude of quick impressions

There is a dynamic or dialectical tension between the individual and society: individuals are free and creative spirits, yet are part of the socialization process

3 assumptions

  • Individuals are both within and outside society.
  • Individuals are both objects and subjects within networks of communicative interaction.
  • Individuals have the impulse to be self-fulfilling and self-completing, that is, they seek an integrated self-concept. Society also tries to integrate itself (cf. Durkheim), although the effect of this may be in opposition to individual integrity (cf. Heidegger – das Man)

People are conscious and creative individuals and the mind plays a crucial role in this mutual orientation and social interaction (cf. Kant (3rd Critique), Goethe, Romanticism)

  • this creativity allows for flexibility and freedom on the part of the individual, but at the same time it helps to create the structures of objective culture that may constrain and stifle this freedom
  • social interaction becomes regularized and has patterns to it, and these become forms of association
  • these patterns and forms, regardless of their content, are what sociologists should study.

Society is not a separate reality of its own:

  • society is just lived experience
  • social forces are not external to, nor necessarily constraining for the individual
  • it is individuals who reproduce society through their actions and interactions

Simmel distinguishes between a personal self and a social self. If there were no self-consciousness (cf. Hegel), symbolic interaction would disappear and human experience would just be the responses to stimuli.

Instead, we live and die in terms of what is intersubjectively meaningful–i.e. we view ourselves in terms of the responses of others (and even of others whom we have never met)

The Philosophy of Money (1900)

Simmel's major work – concerns the social impact and meaning of money: concerned with money as symbol, and what some of the effects of this are for people and society

  • In modern society, money becomes an impersonal or objectified measure of value
  • This implies impersonal, rational ties among people that are institutionalized in the money form
  • relations of domination and subordination become quantitative relationships of more and less money – impersonal and measurable in a rational manner
  • The use of money distances individuals from objects and also provides the means of overcoming this distance
  • The use of money allows much greater flexibility for individuals in society
  • At the same time, personal identity becomes problematic, so that development of the money form has both positive and negative consequences
  • Individual freedom is potentially increased greatly, but there are problems of alienation, fragmentation, and identity construction.

B) Sources of social cohesion – communities of tradition, of civic law, of feeling

1) Durkheim

Social phenomena arisewhen interacting individuals constitute a reality that can no longer be accounted for in terms of the properties of individual actors.

  • “the determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of the individual consciousness.”
  • concerned with the characteristics of groups and structures
  • focused on cohesion or lack of cohesion of specific religious groups
  • showed that such group properties are independent of individual traits
  • examined different rates of behavior in particular groups
  • e.g., a significant increase of suicide rates in a particular group indicates that the social cohesion in that group has been weakened and its members are no longer sufficiently protected against existential crises.
  • cohesion or integration could account for differing rates of suicide

One of the major elements of integration is the extent to which various members interact with one another:

  • participation in rituals is likely to draw members of religious groups into common activities that bind them together
  • work activities that depend on differentiated yet complementary tasks bind workers to the group
  • frequency of interaction correlates with value integration – the shared values and beliefs
  • the stronger the credo of a religious group, the more unified it is likely to be

Yet Durkheim was also careful to point out that there are special cases, in which the credo of the group stresses a shared belief in individualism and free inquiry (Protestantism)

He distinguished between mechanical and organic solidarity.

Mechanicalsolidaritydominates when“ideas and tendencies common to all members of the society are greater in number and intensity than those which pertain personally to each member.”

  • “Solidarity which comes from likeness is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it.”

Organic solidarity, in contrast, develops out of differences, rather than likenesses, between individuals:

  • a product of the division of labour
  • with increasing differentiation of functions come increasing differences between members
  • each element in a differentiated society is less strongly tied to common collective routines
  • while the individual elements of such a system have less in common, they are nevertheless much more interdependent than under mechanical solidarity.

Only if all members of a society were committed to common sets of symbolic representations, to common assumptions about the world around them, could moral unity be assured

  • without them, any society, primitive or modern, was bound to degenerate and decay
  • even systems with a highly developed organic solidarity still needed a common faith, a common conscience, if they were not to disintegrate into a heap of mutually antagonistic and self-seeking individuals
  • cf. Hegel, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel – ethico-political communitarianism

2) Tönnies

Major work:Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) (Community and Society)

Tönnies distinguished between two types of social groupings (dwatypyzbiorowościspołecznej)= ideal types of social organization

  • Gemeinschaft(communityor communal society; wspólnota)
  • Gesellschaft(societyor associational society; zrzeszenie/stowarzyszenie)

Gemeinschaft

  • Typified by rural peasant societies
  • Personal relationships are defined and regulated on the basis of traditional social rules
  • People have simple and direct face-to-face relations with each other
  • Relations determined by Wesenwille (natural will)—i.e., natural and spontaneously arising emotions and expressions of sentiment.

Gesellschaft

  • Typified by modern, cosmopolitan societies with their government bureaucracies and large industrial organizations
  • The creation of Kürwille (rational will)
  • Rational self-interest and calculating conduct act to weaken the traditional bonds of family, kinship, and religion that permeate the Gemeinschaft’s structure.
  • Human relations are more impersonal and indirect, being rationally constructed in the interest of efficiency or other economic and political considerations.

The alienation and the breakdown of cohesive peasant values connected with industrialization led many intellectuals to romanticize the Gemeinschaft after World War I.

This can be seen as a misuse of Tönnies’s dichotomy– a failure to understand that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were ideal types and not categories of classification.

But others argue that the way his distinction is drawn itself reflects an idealisation of a traditional forms of social existence – one that reflects the influence of German romanticism with its (aesthetically sophisticated!) emphasis on the personal and the emotional

3) Schmalenbach

Schmalenbach is best known for his theory of the Bund:

  • variously translated as communions, fusions, leagues, orders, or fraternities
  • an ephemeral, emotionally cohesive form of community
  • located between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
  • relatively short-lived, charismatic communities of rapture, rapport, and experience.

Bund was a common word used to describe small groups that were part of the pervasive waves of youth movements that had been sweeping through Germany since the 1890s.

For Schmalenbach, a bund, or bund-like relationship, is based mostly on impulse and emotion:

  • A frenzy of mutually shared feelings creates cohesiveness among ‘bund’ members and absorbs them deeply into the relationship.
  • This absorption allows the group’s members to feel a fusion or communion with one another.
  • Charismatic and enthusiastic groups of all sorts often exemplify ‘bund’-like relationships; familiar examples include religious cults, communes, fanatical political sects, youth gangs, the relationships of masters and disciples, or even couples in love.
  • ‘Bunds’ exist in the emotional intensity of the moment.
  • They are impulsive and tend to ignore or oppose both traditional Gemeinschaft-like and rational Gesellschaft-like forms of community.
  • Consistent with their highly emotional and impulsive natures, ‘bund’-like relationships, as such, are short-lived.
  • When the highly intense emotional communion burns out, the group will either disband or become institutionalized, thus fitting into the more normal communal or associational patterns of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

A ‘bund’ is most ‘bund’-like at its inception, after which it begins to become less emotionally based and more routine:

  • The ‘bund’ undergoes the same process of community transformation that the sociologist Max Weber (1968) describes as the routinization of charisma
  • Schmalenbach also uses the concept to criticize and refine some aspects of Max Weber’s account of modern social life (his methodological individualism – see below)

C) Capitalism, modernity and rationalization (Weber, Frankfurt School)

1) Weber

Weber sought to develop a scientific approach to sociology:

  • he never fully defined a systematic research program explaining his comparative methodology
  • but his essays on the historical development of Eastern and Western societies suggest what such an approach might entail

Weber demonstrated that the comparative method was essential because the behaviour of institutions in societies could not be understood in isolation.

He developed the ideal type as a methodological tool for comparative sociology.

In analyzing the history of Western societies, Weber focused on rationalism as a unique and central force shaping all Western institutions, including economics, politics, religion, family, stratification systems, and music.

Weber’s best known and most controversial work,The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (1904–05)illustrates the general direction of his thinking:

  • Weber began by noting the statistical correlation in Germany between interest and success in capitalist ventures on the one hand and Protestant background on the other
  • He then attributed this relationship between capitalism and Protestantism to certain accidental psychological consequences of the notions of predestination and calling in Puritan theology.
  • In Calvin’s formulation the doctrine of predestination stated that sinful humanity could know neither why nor to whom God had extended the grace of salvation. Weber inferred that the psychological insecurity that this doctrine was such that they began to look for signs indicating the direction of God’s will in daily life. The consequence was an ethic of unceasing commitment to one’s worldly calling (any lapse would indicate that one’s state of grace was in doubt) and ascetic abstinence from any enjoyment of the profit reaped from such labours. The practical result of such beliefs and practices was, in Weber’s estimation, the most rapid possible accumulation of capital.
  • He never denied his critics’ claims that highly developed capitalist enterprises existed centuries before Calvin.
  • Weber was also aware of other preconditions, both material and psychological, that contributed to the development of modern capitalism.
  • He argued that before Calvinism capitalist enterprise and wealth accumulation were always limited by the prevalent religious order.
  • If some capitalists were, by virtue of their scepticism, able to escape the guilt feelings that the prevailing religious ethos dictated, it was still a fact that no other religious tradition had ever caused people to see the accumulation of capital as a sign of grace.
  • The Puritans adopted asceticism voluntarily, for spiritual reasons. In doingso, however, they helped to create the enormous structure of the modern economic institution, which proceeded to determine the life and values of everyone born into it.

Weber developed a political sociology which makes the crucial distinction between charismatic, traditional, and legal forms of authority.

Charismatic authority, or charisma, refers to the gift of spiritual inspiration underlying the power of religious prophets or extraordinary political leaders. In probing charisma Weber touchedon themes from Nietzsche.

One of his most brilliant later essays, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions”(1916),contains an analysis of the conflicting relationships between eroticism, ascetic and mystical modes of religiosity, and the general process of rationalization.

Weber attempted to build respect for sociology as a discipline:

  • defining a value-free methodology for it
  • analysing the religious cultures of India and China as a basis for comparison with the Western religious tradition

Also of critical importance in his last decade was his examination of the conditions and consequences of the rationalization of political and economic life in the West

2) Frankfurt School – also known as “Critical Theory”

Based at the Institute of Social Research (InstitutfürSozialforschung)in Frankfurt am Main – founded in 1923.

Most prominent figures of the first generation of Critical Theorists: Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993), Eric Fromm (1900-1980).

Since the 1970s, the second generation has been led by Jürgen Habermas; a third generation is represented by Axel Honneth.

  • dissidents who did not feel at home in the capitalist, fascist, or communist systems
  • believed that traditional theory could not adequately explain the development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century
  • critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism
  • shared Marxist-Hegelian premises and concerns

To fill in the perceived omissions of classical Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines: