I am interested in sociology because it offers a macroscopic perspective on human psychology. But, like psychology, it is a value-laden discipline.

Max Weber is known as the forerunner of modern socialism, but I prefer Durkheim, because he says things like this: “A society is not a collection of individuals which an enormous and monstrous machine keeps united and compressed against each other by the use of force. No, solidarity comes from the inside and not from the outside. Men are attached to one another as naturally as the atoms of a mineral and the cells of an organism.” Consequently, Durkheim insists: “The state is the external and visible form of sociability. To abstract from it is thus certainly … to suppose that men do not live in societies.”

The social connectivity of all humans to one another via society “is no less natural to man than egoism, to which, in the interests of simplicity, the economists would reduct the human mind.” ¹

There are three primary views within socialism:

• Symbolic Interactionism
• Functionalism
• Conflict Theory

Symbolic Interactionism

Within symbolic interactionism there exist two primary views: the humanist approach (The Chicago School) and the positivist/scientific approach (The Iowa School) ²

In this Chicago School, Herbert Blumer argues, sociology represents four premises:

1. Individuals act based on the meanings objects have for them;
2. Interaction occurs within a particular social and cultural context in which physical and social objects (persons), as well as situations, must be defined or categorized based on individual meanings;
3. Meanings emerge from interactions with other individuals and with society; and
4. Meanings are continuously created and recre- ated through interpreting processes during interac- tion with others. ³

Manford Kuhn (the Iowa School) argued that Blume’s approach was too vague to be called a science, and was concerned for the future of sociology’s credibility as a method of academic inquiry. Kuhn developed the “Twenty Statements Test” in which participants are asked to give twenty answers to the question “Who am I?”

The Iowa School sought to be more scientific, and less humanistic (per Blumer). Kuhn’s student Norman Denzin illustrated the principles of The Iowa School through studying addiction, childhood, emotions, and life-histories with qualitative and quantitative methodologies. ⁴

Functionalism

The functionalist view has three premises, originating in the work of August Comte (1789) and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917):

1. Society shapes the individual.
2. Social stability and order comes from shared values, norms, and behaviors.
3. Deviance leads to societal transformation, and society must accommodate these transformations if it is to maintain stability. ⁵

Durkheim, for example, comments:

Of itself civilization has no intrinsic and absolute value. What confers value upon it is the fact that it meets certain needs. LAter the proposition will be demonstrated that these needs are themselves consequences of the division of labor. It is because the division of labor is accompanied by an increase in fatigue that man is constrained to seek after, as a compensatory increase, those goods of civilization that otherwise would present no interest to him.” ⁶

Conflict Theory

Core to conflict theory, prinmary developed by Marx, are four premises:

1. Competition. A battle for commodities, status, and sex.
2. Revolution. Group change happens not as a result of willing transformation, but the seizure of the oppressed.
3. Structural Inequality. Individuals and groups that benefit from society’s structure will fight to keep it that way.
4. War. War is the result of conflicting interests among groups, and is inevitable to the degree that they have them. It is classified by immoral by those who desire to avoid war due to its disruptive effect on the current state of affairs.

According to Alan Sears and James Cairns in their book A Good Book, in Theory, the 2008 bank bailouts are a good example of the assumptions of conflict theory playing out in reality — that mainstream political institutions favor the powerful and are in coordinated relationship to maintain this power imbalance ⁷.