Emile Durkheim and Max Weber are commonly and correctly regarded as
two of the foremost comparative analysts in the history of sociology. In
their work they faced a number of common problems that arise in
comparative analysis, and attempted to overcome them in ways that are
still instructive. Both of them, moreover, had occasion during the
course of their careers - Durkheim in 1895 and Weber in 1904 - to
produce major theoretical and methodological statements on the program
for sociology. Each statement was incomplete in many ways; for example,
while both theorists assigned comparative sociological analysis a
central place in their programs for sociology, neither developed a
detailed, explicit statement of strategies for comparative analysis.
Nevertheless, their reflections, considered together, expose the major
methodological dilemmas encountered in comparative analysis. Their
methodological writings are further instructive in that while they began
with methodological perspectives that were radically opposed to one
another, each made a number of significant modifications of these
starting points in the course of his argument. As a result, their
practical programs for sociological investigation - to say nothing of
their actual empirical research - resemble one another much more than
their methodological perspectives.
In this part of the course we will examine the methodological
contributions of Durkheim and Weber, with an eye to identifying certain
general issues in comparative analysis. More particularly, Durkheim and
Weber will be contrast under the following headings:
(1) The character of scientific knowledge and its relation to other kinds of knowledge and cultural values;
(2) The appropriate range of data to be investigated by sociologists;
(3) Classification in sociological investigation; (4) The nature of sociological explanation; and (5) Verification in sociology.
(1)
The character of scientific knowledge and its relation to other kinds of knowledge and cultural values;
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Emile Durkheim:
While insisting that the subject matter of sociology is distinct from
that of other sciences, Durkheim also insisted that the sociologist
should approach his subject matter in the same state of mind as the
natural scientists. Regarding the social sciences of his day as
analogous to alchemy before the rise of the natural sciences, he
condemned them as having dealt "more or less exclusively with concepts
and not with things".
The investigator should free his mind of all preconceptions, take a more
passive relationship to social reality, and deal with phenomena "in
terms of their inherent properties" and their "common external
characteristics" Classifications should not "depend on [the
sociologist] or on the cast of his individual mind but on the nature of
things.
Durkheim's positivism is understandable as an expression of his
impatience with unfounded and unverified theories of his day, and as a
strategic appeal for empirical observation. Yet as a general
methodological program, it evidently presents serious problems. The
decisive problem concerns the possibility of ridding oneself of all
preconceptions and letting the real world of empirical phenomena speak
for itself. How is it possible to perceive a single set of external
characteristics without actively selecting from among all the
possibilities? |
Max Weber:
Unlike Durkheim, Max Weber regarded scientific knowledge of society and
culture as emanating from a number of "one-sided" (that is, selective)
views of different aspects of cultural life. It was by selecting,
over-emphasizing, and simplifying certain aspects that bodies of
scientific knowledge were generated. Selectivity is not determined by
the "nature of things," as Durkheim held, but by the initiative of the
investigator.
But by what criteria is this selection - this reduction to the finite
made? According to Weber it is not made by nature, as Durkheim might
argue. Historical configurations interest the investigator, rather,
because they are culturally significant for him. This implies further
that the investigator has a "value-orientation" toward historical events
and situations.
Accordingly, the "presuppositionless" approach to empirical reality was,
for Weber, an impossibility. To attempt to be empirically exhaustive
"is not only practically impossible - it is simply nonsense" . It is
essential to bring order out of chaos by selection of aspects of events,
and we select only those parts of reality that are "interesting and
significant to us, because only [those parts are] ...related to the
cultural values with which we approach reality" . Social or cultural
reality is not that which presses itself on the uncluttered mind of the
investigator; it is "a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the
world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and
significance."
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(2)
The appropriate range of data to be investigated by sociologists
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The subject
matter of
Social Sciences
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Emile Durkheim:
Durkheim regarded the proper subject matter of sociology as "social
facts." These are to be distinguished from both biological (eating,
sleeping, for instance) and psychological (reasoning, for instance)
facts. They include those aspects of society (for example, a society's
religious system, its language, and its system of currency) which have
an existence independent of the individual consciousness of society's
members and exercise a constraining influence on their behavior. The
existence of social facts is (1) to be defined independently of
individual consciousness, (2) to be expected to manifest regularities
peculiar to themselves and not expressible in psychological terms. and
(3) to be expected to impose their influence on the individual's
behavior.
Thus Durkheim was concerned to set the social level apart from
the psychological, and to insist on their independence. Social facts
differ from psychological facts in quality, in substratum, and in
milieu, and he reiterated that the substance of social life cannot be
explained by purely psychological factors. |
Max Weber:
Weber by contrast to Durkheim incorporated a distinctively
psychological level into his definition of the basic substance of
sociology and social action. Action is defined as such "insofar as the
acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior - be it
overt or covert, omission or acquiescence." Action is "social" insofar
as "its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and
is thereby oriented in its course".
Weber's concern with subjective meaning implies that he regarded
the individual as motivated, assessing his environment in terms of its
significance for him, and organizing his behavior accordingly;
furthermore, social action cannot be understood, described, or analyzed
without reference to this subjective meaning. Durkheim may have agreed,
but would have insisted that such meaning is relevant for psychology
but not for sociology.
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Approaches to Empirical Data:
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Emile Durkheim:
Durkheim focused upon the observable and the measurable. A social fact
such as social solidarity, he noted, "is a completely moral phenomenon
which, taken by itself, does not lend itself to exact observation nor
indeed to measurement." He was drawn to study various observable kinds
of statistics, which record "the currents of daily life" (for example,
market statistics); costumes, which record fashions; and works of art,
which record taste. Psychology suffered on this count, Durkheim added,
because psychological facts are "internal by definition," and therefore
inaccessible; "it seems that they can be treated as external only by
doing violence to their nature. For Durkheim, the preference would be to
regard statistical series as standardized expressions of definite
"things" distinct from any meaning that individuals attached to them.
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Max Weber:
Weber, because he focused on subjective meaning, was less prepared to
treat socio-cultural phenomena as "things." The phenomena of the social
sciences involve "a problem of a specifically different type from those
which the schemes of the exact natural sciences in general can or seek
to solve." These phenomena are "psychological and intellectual" and call
for "empathetic understanding."
Accordingly, Weber discussed different types of understanding,
the ways in which meaning can be sensitively and accurately grasped.
Weber was also interested in statistical uniformities, but only in so
far as they can be regarded as manifestations of subjective meaning of a
course of social action. Furthermore, the two scholars leaned toward a
different approach to their data. For Weber a statistic would be
reflective of the subjective-meaning complex of an actor, and would
derive its significance from that complex rather than from any
"external" or "superficial" characteristic".
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Most of the significant contrasts between the two theorists, as
reviewed up to this point, may be understood in terms of how each
conceptualized the role of the investigator (observer) and the role of
the actor (observed) in the generation of knowledge
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Emile Durkheim:
Durkheim assigned a passive role to both. In his insistence that facts
are "things" he held that they cannot be modified by a "simple act of
the [observer's] will"; in his insistence that the observer free himself
of all previous preoccupations, he called on him not to attempt to
influence empirical facts, but to let them impress themselves upon his
mind according to their inherent properties. In these ways the observer
is regarded as passive. And because facts are "social," they enjoy an
existence independent from the individual, work their influence upon him
despite his efforts to resist, and are governed by laws specific to the
social level. In these senses, actors as individuals contribute little
to sociological knowledge
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Max Weber:
Weber contrasts with Durkheim on both counts. By insisting on the
impossibility of a "pre-supposition-less" sociology, he afforded the
observer a more active role in the generation of scientific knowledge.
The precise role of the observer, moreover, is guided toward empirical
data and problems, which are significant to him from a cultural point of
view. And by insisting on the centrality of subjective meaning as the
basic ingredient of action, including social action, Weber gave both the
actor and the investigator a more active role. In regarding the actor
as meaningfully oriented to his environment, Weber insisted that a
significant portion of the variables that "explain" human behavior had
to be found in the pattern of meanings given to his environment and
behaving in accord with these meanings. The actor's own definition of
the situation, in short, contributes to explaining his behavior. Also,
by insisting on the importance of subjective meaning, Weber saw the task
of the observer - that of empathetic understanding - as calling for a
more active effort than observing and recording the phenomena that
nature produces.
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(3)
Classification in sociological investigation
Both Durkheim and
Weber were committed to the principle that sociology should be a
generalizing science, as contrasted, for example, with history. A
necessary preliminary to such statements, moreover, is to develop
concepts which apply to more than one case. How did Weber and Durkheim
come to terms with the necessity of generating general descriptive and
classificatory categories, and how did their efforts square with the
paradigmatic assumptions each embraced?
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Emile Durkheim:
One important way in which Durkheim assessed the general significance of
social facts was to relate them to a conception of "normal" or
"pathological social facts". Conceptions such as normal or pathological
should be defined in relation to a "given species" and "only in relation
to a given phase of its development." What is normal for a simple,
preliterate society is certainly not normal for an advanced, complex
society. For any "given species" it is the statistical generality of a
social fact that gives it its normality.
The significance of a social fact - that is, whether it is normal
or pathological - is to be assessed not by some intrinsic feature of
the fact but by the societal context of the fact, viz., the requirements
of the species at its level of development. Such a formulation calls
immediately for a classification of species and of levels of
development, since without it the investigator could not make the
necessary assessments. Durkheim was aware of this pressure to classify
that arose from his formulation and in proposing to classify, he tried,
much like Weber, to steer a course between diversity and complexity of
social life.
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| Max Weber:
Weber's "ideal type" is a methodological solution to the problem
of diverse social reality on the one hand and the commitment to
sociology as a generalizing science, on the other hand. An ideal type is
a device employed by an investigator to facilitate empirical analysis.
It is not a description of reality; it is not an hypothesis. Rather,
according to Weber's somewhat cumbersome definition, it is "formed by
the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the
synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and
occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged
according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified
analytical construct." The ideal type is not derived from empirical
reality; rather, it is the selection of the essential - indeed, one
might say "decisive," as did Durkheim - features of a complex historical
situation and molding them into a simplified picture. By drawing out
type-elements from the myriad unique historical experiences of concrete
acting individuals, the investigator makes them comparable with one
another. By constructing an ideal-typical capitalistic system of pricing
and marketing, the investigator characterizes in general terms the
orientation of numerous actors, who may differ in detail in their
concrete subjective orientations to the market. Description in terms of
the ideal type selects from those orientations and makes them similar.
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(4)
The nature of sociological explanation
Both Durkheim and Weber saw classification and the creation of ideal types as means for interpretation.
They are only an introduction to the truly explanatory part of the science. Of what does the latter consist?. |
Emile Durkheim:
Causal analysis, instead, involves the search for "a correspondence
between the fact under consideration and the general needs of the social
organism, and in what this correspondence consists, without occupying
ourselves with whether it has been intentional [i.e., directed toward a
given end] or not" . While stressing this priority, Durkheim
acknowledged that knowledge of the function was "necessary for the
complete explanation of the phenomena," because "it is generally
necessary that [a fact] be useful in order that it may maintain itself" .
According to Durkheim 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. The sociologist's main task is
to discover features of the social milieu that contribute to the
character of social life; Durkheim himself sought to explain the social
division of labor by reference to social facts such as the size of
society and its dynamic density, and to explain variations in the social
suicide rate by reference to the ways in which groups are integrated
and regulated.
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Max Weber:
Weber's conception of sociological explanation is rooted in his
notions of interpretation and the ideal type. In his general discussion
of how subjective meaning can be understood, he spoke of the importance
of "explanatory understanding." In particular this involves grasping
the motive of an individual actor, or understanding "what makes him do
[something] at precisely this moment and in these circumstances".
Motives are highly diverse, and Weber did not conceive of them in a
narrow psychological sense. They might include, for example, an
individual's self-interest in a given situation, his inclination to
adhere to normative standards, or his belief in the legitimacy of a
given set of social relationships. In any historical situation the
investigator should expect to find not single or pure motives, but a
number in complex combination.
What Weber seemed to be saying is that statistical regularities
between, say, aggregated rates of behavior are meaningless unless
reference is made to some kind of subjective or psychological link
between them. For example, the facts that various classes in French
society were making irregular forward progress (a statistical
regularity) and that numerous members of this class showed evidence of
dissatisfaction with the French social order (a statistical regularity)
bear no intelligible connection with one another until some typical
meaningful connection is made. Even further, Weber appeared to suggest
that the theoretical significance of regularities is to be found in the
realm of subjective meaning!.
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| Emile Durkheim:Durkheim,
embracing a "natural science" model for sociology - at least in his
manifesto - envisioned the possibility in sociology of discovering
causal uniformities and explaining individual facts by applying them.
Sociological theory should emerge at its own level on the basis of
observation of social facts. No recourse need be made to that separate
realm of psychology except for "useful suggestions".
| Max Weber:Weber,
however, stressing the differences between sociology and what he
understood to be the natural sciences of his day, found it essential to
construct idealized psychological accounts to give theoretical meaning
to social regularities |
(5)
Verification in sociology
Both Durkheim and Weber addressed themselves to the empirical procedures
available in order to lend empirical support to sociological
propositions, and both defined this task in terms of linking causes and
effects. Durkheim spoke of "establishing relations of causality,"
whereas Weber spoke of "causal significance" and "causally adequate
interpretation". Each addressed the issue of attaining reliable
empirical knowledge in the absence of experimentation.
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Emile Durkheim:
Durkheim's general answer to the issue of verification of sociological
explanation was simple: when the experiment is not available, the only
recourse is indirect comparison, or the comparative method. Before
characterizing the particular ways in which he suggested employing it,
however, he launched a brief polemic against John Stuart Mill's
observation that a given event may have different causes under different
circumstances, and enunciated the principle that "a given effect has
always a single corresponding cause," adding that, for example, "if
suicide depends on more than one cause, it is because, in reality, there
are several kinds of suicide."
Durkheim's chosen method to establish cause and effect was the
method of concomitant variation or correlation. "For this method to be
reliable, it is not necessary that all the variables differing from
those which we are comparing shall have been strictly excluded. The mere
parallelism of the series of values presented by the two phenomena,
provided that it has been established in a sufficient number and variety
of cases, is proof that a relationship exists between them. Such
reasoning shows the necessity for Durkheim's postulate that a given
effect has always a single corresponding cause, which, if correct,
permits stronger inference from the correlation than might otherwise be
the case
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Max Weber:
Weber did not develop even as limited a statement of the strategies of
comparative analysis as did Durkheim. Insight may be gained into his
reasoning, however, by examining what he described as the "imaginary
experiment." Listing this "uncertain procedure" after describing the
experimental, statistical, and comparative methods, he characterized it
as a process of "thinking away certain elements of a chain of motivation
and working out the course of action which would then probably ensue,
thus arriving at a causal judgment" , What sort of methodology underlies
this procedure?
In one of his methodological essays, published in 1905, Weber
resumed his polemic against those who argued for a
"pre-supposition-less" approach to history. Rather, he argued,
historical explanation - the attribution of effects to causes - involves
a series of abstractions. The decisive abstraction occurs when "we
conceive of one or a few of the actual causal components as modified in a
certain direction and then ask ourselves whether under the conditions
which have been thus changed, the same effect . . . or some other effect
'would be expected" . Would the relevant chain of historical events
have been otherwise if a given battle had had a different outcome, if a
political leader had not been assassinated, and so on? To analyze these
possibilities is the essence of the mental experiment. It involves
disregarding what actually happened and the "mental construction of a
course of events which is altered through modification in one or more
'conditions'.
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Conclusions
Durkheim's and
Weber's discussion of the logic of verification and proof differ a great
deal from one another, because their general programs for sociology
differ. Durkheim, approaching social science more from a model of
natural science, attempted to modify and adapt the logic and procedures
of the natural sciences to sociological inquiry; Weber, approaching
social science in a manner which allowed him to escape the pitfalls of
historicism, attempted to devise procedures to permit more generalizable
inferences than historians typically permitted themselves. Yet the two
also approximated one another in significant ways. Both settled on the
centrality of comparative sociology - the comparative analysis of
similarities and differences in as many empirical instances as could be
assembled. Both were sensitive, moreover, to the problems of taking into
account controlling, if you will - sources of empirical variation that
could "contaminate" suspected causal associations, though neither
produced anything like a systematic strategy designed to overcome these
problems.
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Source: Neil Smelser's Comparative Methods in the Social Sciences, Prentice-Hall, 1976, Chapter 3.
Note: The table aimed to provide a guide when reading the text.
It should not be a substitute to the reading especially because it does
not include critical evaluation of Weber's and Durkheim's strategies.
The Comparative Strategies of Durkheim and Weber
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Max Weber
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Emile Durkheim
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| Similarity |
Both advocate and use comparative methods that are
consistent with their substantive conceptions of order and change, and
with epistemological conceptions of social scientific knowledge.
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| Comparative Strategy |
Case-based Comparative Research
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Variable-based Comparative Research
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| Epstimology |
Weber's comparative methodology emerges from his
preoccupation with the origins of historical diversity and neo-Kantian
philosophy of science.
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Durkheim grounds his comparative strategy in a
substantive view of society as a system and in a positivist vision of a
natural science of society.
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| The Goals of Research |
Historical diversity as major subject of interest
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Historical diversity as a hindrance
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| Classification tools |
Ideal types
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Species
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| Explanations |
Generalizations are historically concrete
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Generalizations are abstractly ahistorical
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| Verification |
Explanations are genetic
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Explanations are functional
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Source: Ragin and Zaret's paper Theory and Method in Comparative Research, Social Forces, 61, 1983, 731-754.
Follow the assignments of unit 9
If you need the advise of the teacher write e-mail to levi@poli.haifa.ac.il
If you want to address the class write e-mail to method@research.haifa.ac.il
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