Our Common Nature #1 : Sociology 101
Hi everybody, Mary here.
So, here's the beginning of my very pretentious and intellectual series of posts called "Our Common Nature", talking about various features of the human behaviour and how it relates, in the end, to our lives in general and our inter-personal relationships.
(That's it, I already feel like I've lost half of my readership just by being this pretentious.)
But I'm going to do it anyways, because I love trying to understand other human beings (now it sounds like I'm an alien) and since I've taken a few lessons in philosophy for two years in uni (+1 in high-school), I just wanted to pass down the little amount of knowledge and researches done online that gave me this very tormented and twisted perception of life.
I will start this series of nine posts with a few posts on very simple basics of sociology, psychology and philosophy, and the very first one will be about sociology.
First of all, there are two very dominant schools in sociology, and that's what I will be talking about. The very first one is the holist school, led by Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) in France. To summarise their opinion on the interaction between society and individuals, the major works that need to be understood are Durkheim's novel Les Règles De La Méthode Sociologique (1895) and Le Suicide (1897). In order to be a good sociologist, society must be seen as an external factor, and analysed as a matter of facts. Suicide is then explained by various reasons such as gender, level of income and location of habitation (city or countryside). Although personal elements are not omitted from these works, society is seen as a sort of "cloak" that ends up determining the individual's behaviour. We could parallel this with Orwell's 1984, but that work appeared much later. Pierre Bourdieu, influenced by Durkheim's works, continued on the determinist part of sociology, explaining the reproduction of social casts which also reproduces inequalities and little to no change in social classes, and even coined the term "habitus" : a way that individuals use the knowledge of society and which influences their personal behaviour in daily activies. Bourdieu's theories even went until the point where people could be classified according to the types of capital (economic, cultural, symbolic, and so on) and put in categories, which could even be linked with specific activities such as playing the piano, the tennis, drinking beer instead of wine, playing football, and so on. Although this seems to be a little bit cliché, this has been proven to be true very often, especially when studying the French population. He also criticised the "symbolic violence" which is linked to their perceived power according to their social status, and that can lead to feelings of inferiority and insignificance linked to the interiorisation of the social classes and their hierarchy.
To summarise, according to the holist sociologists, society has a power over individuals, who accept it and don't even feel the power since it's all they've known since they were brought up in society.
The second school is the individualist school, led by Max Weber (1864-1920) and Raymond Boudon (1934-2013). Unlike the first school, this school claims that individuals influence society by the sum of their actions, not the opposite. Weber was then an adamant defender of individual behaviour in society, which leads to personal motivations changing society. He explained society's changes at the end of the 19th century with the growth of rationalisation and bureaucracy, in order to make everything clearer, and used ethics (Protestantism and capitalism) to explain the personal motivations of the entrepreneur. Personal actions can be explained by emotions or values. Boudon explains to a further extent the inequalities, especially in the school system, by the fact that even if more people can access to a longer education, if everyone can excess it and evolve, the higer positions are harder to reach, and to access a position similar to your parents', you need a bigger diploma to for these higher positions is now increasingly higher than for the previous generations. In return, individuals adjust their behaviour according to their parents, and only see their little achievements as something bigger than the previous generation, while inequalities are persistent. In the end, people subconsciously reproduce social inequalities this way, according to him. His methods of sociology, explained in L'inégalité Des Chances (1973), explains that individual actions given a social situation shape the results of the change in said social situation. But to explain sociology, according to him, everything can be explained through "medotologist individualism", or better explained, the individuals before society.
To summarise this part, the indivualist school explains sociology as an effect of individuals on society, not the opposite.
We can say that both schools are valid to explain sociology, and that society and indivualist are linked not just in one way but both ways, and that people can feel more one side or the other according to personal convictions. I personally believe that society influences more individuels than the opposite, because of trends, clichés and other pre-concieved ideas that we can't seem to get rid of (homophobia, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and so on, anyone ?)... But anyone can have their opinion on the matter !
Anyways, I'll leave the discussion right there. I hope this cleared up your ideas (and please coreect me for any mistakes/inacurracies !) and I'll see you very soon with the next post !
And as usual, our last word : KIDNEYS !!!
I will start this series of nine posts with a few posts on very simple basics of sociology, psychology and philosophy, and the very first one will be about sociology.
First of all, there are two very dominant schools in sociology, and that's what I will be talking about. The very first one is the holist school, led by Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) in France. To summarise their opinion on the interaction between society and individuals, the major works that need to be understood are Durkheim's novel Les Règles De La Méthode Sociologique (1895) and Le Suicide (1897). In order to be a good sociologist, society must be seen as an external factor, and analysed as a matter of facts. Suicide is then explained by various reasons such as gender, level of income and location of habitation (city or countryside). Although personal elements are not omitted from these works, society is seen as a sort of "cloak" that ends up determining the individual's behaviour. We could parallel this with Orwell's 1984, but that work appeared much later. Pierre Bourdieu, influenced by Durkheim's works, continued on the determinist part of sociology, explaining the reproduction of social casts which also reproduces inequalities and little to no change in social classes, and even coined the term "habitus" : a way that individuals use the knowledge of society and which influences their personal behaviour in daily activies. Bourdieu's theories even went until the point where people could be classified according to the types of capital (economic, cultural, symbolic, and so on) and put in categories, which could even be linked with specific activities such as playing the piano, the tennis, drinking beer instead of wine, playing football, and so on. Although this seems to be a little bit cliché, this has been proven to be true very often, especially when studying the French population. He also criticised the "symbolic violence" which is linked to their perceived power according to their social status, and that can lead to feelings of inferiority and insignificance linked to the interiorisation of the social classes and their hierarchy.
To summarise, according to the holist sociologists, society has a power over individuals, who accept it and don't even feel the power since it's all they've known since they were brought up in society.
The second school is the individualist school, led by Max Weber (1864-1920) and Raymond Boudon (1934-2013). Unlike the first school, this school claims that individuals influence society by the sum of their actions, not the opposite. Weber was then an adamant defender of individual behaviour in society, which leads to personal motivations changing society. He explained society's changes at the end of the 19th century with the growth of rationalisation and bureaucracy, in order to make everything clearer, and used ethics (Protestantism and capitalism) to explain the personal motivations of the entrepreneur. Personal actions can be explained by emotions or values. Boudon explains to a further extent the inequalities, especially in the school system, by the fact that even if more people can access to a longer education, if everyone can excess it and evolve, the higer positions are harder to reach, and to access a position similar to your parents', you need a bigger diploma to for these higher positions is now increasingly higher than for the previous generations. In return, individuals adjust their behaviour according to their parents, and only see their little achievements as something bigger than the previous generation, while inequalities are persistent. In the end, people subconsciously reproduce social inequalities this way, according to him. His methods of sociology, explained in L'inégalité Des Chances (1973), explains that individual actions given a social situation shape the results of the change in said social situation. But to explain sociology, according to him, everything can be explained through "medotologist individualism", or better explained, the individuals before society.
To summarise this part, the indivualist school explains sociology as an effect of individuals on society, not the opposite.
We can say that both schools are valid to explain sociology, and that society and indivualist are linked not just in one way but both ways, and that people can feel more one side or the other according to personal convictions. I personally believe that society influences more individuels than the opposite, because of trends, clichés and other pre-concieved ideas that we can't seem to get rid of (homophobia, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and so on, anyone ?)... But anyone can have their opinion on the matter !
Anyways, I'll leave the discussion right there. I hope this cleared up your ideas (and please coreect me for any mistakes/inacurracies !) and I'll see you very soon with the next post !
And as usual, our last word : KIDNEYS !!!
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