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  • Prof: Okay, now let me--I actually would

  • like to spend as much time as I can on Durkheim's methodology.

  • I have lots of notes.

  • This is the twenty-fourth lecture, note,

  • this semester for this course.

  • But let me rush through of the test questions and just to tell

  • you how I would like to deal with them.

  • I think the first one is very obvious, probably a bit too

  • obvious.

  • The question is how can you make it interesting?

  • I hope that the distinction between power and domination is

  • clear.

  • Right?

  • Power means that somebody can impose its will on somebody

  • else, even if that other person opposes it.

  • There is a strong element of coercion involved.

  • Right?

  • You can coerce people to obey your command.

  • Domination implies that you do not have to use coercion

  • systematically, because people tend to

  • internalize the reasons those who have power use in order to

  • legitimate why they should have power.

  • Right?

  • And then this brings us to the notion of legitimacy.

  • Right?

  • Legitimacy are the claims which are made by those who have

  • power, which try to justify why it is

  • reasonable that they should issue commands and others should

  • obey it.

  • So far, very simple. Right?

  • What is kind of controversial about this?

  • It's controversial the way how Weber uses the notion of

  • legitimacy.

  • Normally we, in modern democratic theory,

  • we believe--right?--a system is legitimate when it has popular

  • consent.

  • We think about universal suffrage.

  • People go to free and fair elections, and then they elect

  • leaders, and then they follow those elected to office this

  • way.

  • Then power is legitimate.

  • But I think Weber wants to have a broader notion of legitimacy.

  • Because free and fair elections, operating with

  • universal suffrage, go back one-hundred years in

  • human history, and in some countries it still

  • does not exist.

  • And Weber does not want to describe the last ten minutes of

  • human history for human history's twenty-four hours.

  • Right?

  • He wants to offer some conceptual tools to understand

  • the whole twenty-four hours.

  • So that's why he has this interesting notion of

  • legitimacy; which it does imply that people

  • have to have a certain degree of belief in the validity of the

  • legitimacy claims.

  • But it is a rather passive notion of belief.

  • They don't have to love the person in position of authority;

  • they do not have to elect it.

  • They simply--it's enough if they think, "Well I cannot

  • think of a better alternative."

  • Right?

  • Another dictator could be worse than this one.

  • Right?

  • This is a dictator, but a reasonable one.

  • And Weber will say, as long as this is happening,

  • the person in authority will not have to use coercion

  • systematically, and therefore it will be

  • legitimate.

  • Right?

  • Let me also just say--of course, the coercive element is

  • also in domination.

  • Right?

  • If people disobey the law, then they will be coerced.

  • There is certainly a promise of coercion, even in modern free

  • democracies.

  • People are put in jail; in this country people are even

  • executed.

  • Right?

  • So there is an element of coercion.

  • Just the real question is how systematic that coercion should

  • be?

  • And for Weber, pure exercise of authority is

  • relatively rare and marginal.

  • I would say, for instance,

  • the sort of last year or two or three of Hitler was fairly

  • illegitimate.

  • Hitler had to use massive coercion.

  • Certain epochs of rule of Stalin in the Soviet Union were

  • illegitimate, not all the rule of Stalin.

  • During the Second World War he established some legitimacy.

  • But when he had to imprison ten million people--

  • right?--and to kill tens of thousands or hundreds of

  • thousands, that is an indication that this

  • is illegitimate.

  • Okay?

  • So that's the way how I would handle it--right?--to work

  • around this interesting conception of legitimacy,

  • and what is for and against this.

  • Well this is again a very simple question,

  • traditional and legal-rational authority.

  • Right?

  • The basic difference is--right?--that traditional

  • authority, you have a personal master.

  • In legal-rational authority you do not have a personal master.

  • You obey the laws, and the people who are in

  • charge, who are superiors, will also have to obey the same

  • laws, what you are required to do.

  • And traditional authority is legitimated by the sanctity of

  • age-old rules.

  • Here again I think the interesting issue,

  • if I would write about this, will be, well this is a big

  • historical distinction.

  • But Weber also uses it to describe, in contemporary

  • society, different types of organizations.

  • So contemporary theory has a big dose of traditional

  • authority in it--right?--and I would try to elaborate on this.

  • Well this is--right?--one of the trickier questions:

  • Why does Weber believe that bureaucracy is efficient?

  • And you may agree or may disagree with him.

  • So first of all, I would state why Weber

  • believes that bureaucracy is efficient.

  • I would emphasize that he thinks that bureaucracy is the

  • most efficient, in the technical terms--not

  • necessarily otherwise.

  • And then, of course, the way how he defines

  • bureaucracy.

  • People are put into position in terms of their competence.

  • There is a rule of law.

  • It is a predictable environment, a bureaucratic

  • environment.

  • There is a hierarchy of appeals; if somebody makes a mistake,

  • how to appeal.

  • This, of course, all makes it efficient.

  • Now we know that bureaucracies are often inefficient.

  • So how to reconcile this?

  • Well it's not that Weber was totally insensitive to the

  • problem of inefficiencies of bureaucracies,

  • and he formulated it how that bureaucracies are caught between

  • formal and substantive rationality.

  • That's the way how I would probably defend Weber--to say he

  • was not that naīve to believe that bureaucracies are

  • always efficient.

  • They would be efficient if they would be purely formally

  • rational, but they are not.

  • And one good example is welfare bureaucracies,

  • which do establish a kind of patron-client

  • relationships--right?--between bureaucracies and clients.

  • Some people refer to this as welfare dependency,

  • which makes it, of course, a cause of

  • inefficiency.

  • Well this is a nice question to answer, and we discussed this a

  • great deal.

  • We know that charismatic leaders appear in times of

  • crisis, when people are looking for a change.

  • Right?

  • So Barack Obama, during the presidential

  • campaign, he has read Weber carefully;

  • he knew how to frame--right?--his message

  • exactly as a charismatic message.

  • It was all about change, and it was about hope.

  • Right?

  • In contrast with Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

  • Both of them emphasized that "we are experienced'.

  • This is not what people wanted to hear when they wanted to have

  • change.

  • So yes, in this respect, Barack Obama did have a

  • charismatic appeal, and this charismatic appeal did

  • gel.

  • Right?

  • Many people responded to his charisma.

  • He was criticized by his opponent that he's a rock

  • star--right?--because people got so excited about him.

  • So he could appeal to the emotion of people.

  • Right?

  • He could appeal to them.

  • But, of course, as we again discussed in

  • discussion sections-- also briefly in class--Barack

  • Obama has a charismatic appeal, but he operates in a

  • legal-rational authority.

  • Right?

  • And we just have seen that very recently--right?--making a

  • decision about the war in Afghanistan.

  • Right?

  • Well he had to deal with realities.

  • Right?

  • So well Weber would--in the classical sense,

  • charisma in Weber is reserved to great religious leaders,

  • such as Muhammad or Jesus or whatever,

  • or the great prophets.

  • And in this sense charisma is not really applicable to

  • politicians operating in legal-rational authority.

  • So Weber would have some unease to call Barack Obama a

  • charismatic leader.

  • I would think he would concede that certainly Barack Obama had

  • charismatic features, as such.

  • Now the fifth question: Durkheim and the study of law.

  • Why on earth he starts from the study of law in analyzing

  • society?

  • Because he's a methodological collectivist,

  • and because he wants to capture something like the collective

  • conscience, which is more than the sum

  • total of individual consciousness.

  • But he's also a scientist, and I hope I will have a little

  • time to talk about the methodology.

  • He wants to be very rigorous, and he doesn't want to start

  • with ideas; he wants to start with facts.

  • Well he's caught in--right?--a contradiction.

  • So collective conscience is ideas.

  • Right?

  • How on earth you study them objectively?

  • And law is a great example, because law is written down.

  • Right?

  • There is written law.

  • You can study it objectively, and it is not only individual

  • consciousness what guides us all.

  • So I think this is the major reason why his point of

  • departure is--as an example--law because this is what he can

  • rigorously study.

  • It can be seen as a social fact--right?--

  • that this is the law, and to understand why this law

  • came into being, under what circumstances,

  • and how does it influence people?

  • Well, of course, the inspiration comes from

  • Montesquieu.

  • All right.

  • Well agreement and disagreement.

  • I think the real question is whether you buy into

  • methodological collectivism or not.

  • Some of you may be methodological individualists.

  • Especially if you are an Econ major, you tend to be an

  • economic individualist, a methodological individualist.

  • Right?

  • You tend to believe that there are rational individual actors

  • who pursue interest, and you are very skeptical

  • about anything which is assumedly above the individual.

  • So in that case, if you are a methodological

  • individualist-- and, in fact,

  • I think the dominant trend in social sciences today is

  • methodological individualism and a great deal of skepticism about

  • methodological collectivism-- that can be a kind of critical

  • handle on it.

  • Or at least you can show this is the way how it can be

  • criticized, and you can show why you

  • actually think that methodological collectivism is

  • reasonable.

  • Okay, the sixth question, organic and mechanical

  • solidarity, and how this is related to Weber's typology of

  • authority.

  • I mean, it's pretty simple.

  • There are very important distinctions--di

  • fferences--between Durkheim and Weber.

  • Durkheim looks at what brings society together.

  • The central concept is solidarity.

  • Weber looks at social conflict, what takes society apart.

  • So he looks at struggle around power.

  • Right?

  • Weber is coming from the lineage of, I would say,

  • Hobbes and Nietzsche.

  • Right?

  • That's where the Weberian view comes from.

  • There are, of course, similarities.

  • Organic solidarity is what legal-rational authority is for

  • Weber.

  • They try to capture modernity.

  • Both are similar in the sense that they are also social

  • typologies of societies, but also types of social

  • organizations in any given society, as such.

  • So these are some similarities.

  • Okay, I think that's probably about it.

  • Well the question of anomie.

  • I think we covered this recently.

  • So I don't have to refresh your memory as much.

  • The notion of anomie in Durkheim comes out of the

  • absence of sufficient regulation.

  • And this is a temporary product which emerges because mechanical

  • solidarity is breaking down and organic solidarity has not been

  • established yet.

  • And in the transition from mechanical solidarity--

  • traditional society--into a modern urban industrial society,

  • people have a problem of regulation in value systems,

  • and that's when they are anomic.

  • But this will go away.

  • What is the theory of human nature behind this?

  • This can be debated.

  • One possible argument is that since he believes that order has

  • to come from the outside, from above, he tends to believe

  • that without order, created by a societal level,

  • collective conscience, we would do evil things.

  • We need to be regulated. Right?

  • Well of course he knows that we can be overregulated,

  • and then that's also pathological.

  • But the main pathology, at least in the transition from

  • mechanical to organic solidarity,

  • is the absence of regulation and the problem that humans may

  • do abnormal, pathological, or evil acts.

  • So there is a notion of humans needing control over them.

  • Well this speaks to the eighth question: anomie and alienation.

  • They are in many ways the opposite to each other.

  • Right?

  • Alienation means that you are over-regulated.

  • You are not in control of your own life, of your own fate.

  • That is what alienation means.

  • Also Marx is inspired by Rousseau.

  • It's a kind of Rousseauian conception of nature behind

  • that.

  • The problem comes from society; it doesn't come from the

  • individual.

  • Right?

  • We are born in society, we are social by nature,

  • and if modernity, modern capitalism,

  • would be removed, we again would act socially and

  • collectively in a good way.

  • So that's--and in contrast, like Durkheim's notion is that

  • the absence of regulation, that's what causes pathologies.

  • All right?

  • Ninth question.

  • This is something what I think you find difficulties to deal

  • with, because you did not find the word 'disenchantment' in any

  • of the readings.

  • And indeed Weber did not use the word very often.

  • He did use it most critically in an essay what he wrote after

  • he was trying to combine his various sociology of religions.

  • But the word 'enchantment' is translated from the German word

  • magic.

  • So disenchantment means a situation in which the world

  • loses magic, when magic is moved out of life.

  • And this is happening with rationalization.

  • Right?

  • The big process of historical evolution is towards

  • rationalization and the loss of magic.

  • And the text what you have to support that is in The

  • Protestant Ethic, where Weber makes a big deal

  • out of it.

  • That's what especially Calvinism and the teaching of

  • predestination did, it got rid of magic.

  • Right?

  • But though he is, say, a rationalist,

  • he sees the downside of rationalism;

  • the loss of magic is the price what we have to pay for

  • rationalization.

  • And he's a bit nostalgic about the world, when it was magic,

  • when the relations were magical.

  • So that is kind of a permanent condition of modernity;

  • things are not getting any better.

  • That's, I think, one of the big differences with

  • Durkheim's notion of anomie.

  • The loss of magic actually does mean, like--there is roots in

  • Marx here.

  • Because the loss of magic means that actually you seem to be

  • more vulnerable to fate.

  • Right?

  • Magic, you were a magician, you had ways how to make God,

  • the omnipotent God, to do things for you;

  • for instance, to save you.

  • Right?

  • You could do it through magical means.

  • In a rationalized world, we are less in control of our

  • lives.

  • So in this sense I think Weber's notion of disenchantment

  • is closer to the Marxian notion of alienation,

  • rather than the Durkheimian notion of anomie.

  • Well social causes of suicide.

  • Well we just covered this the last lecture.

  • The argument is--right?--that we believe that suicide is the

  • most individual, intimate decision.

  • He actually does show, and demonstrate,

  • this is not the case, because there are great

  • differences in suicide rate across countries.

  • These differences tend to be very stable.

  • There are also strong relationships between suicide

  • and religion, and suicide and education,

  • and therefore there are-- right?--social determinants of

  • this very individualistic action,

  • as suicide.

  • Well there are these two dimensions in which you can

  • conceptualize suicide: how well integrated you are or

  • how well regulated you are.

  • And Durkheim has this idea that too much integration and too

  • much regulation, or too little integration or

  • too little regulation, are both abnormal.

  • He's for the golden middle road.

  • Right?

  • Normality is in the middle road.

  • Sort of an anomic suicide happens when you are not

  • sufficiently regulated.

  • Egoistic suicide occurs when you are not sufficiently

  • integrated in society.

  • That's when you egoistically commit suicide,

  • because you don't care how yourself,

  • killing yourself, will affect your beloved ones--

  • right?--because you don't have beloved ones.

  • Right?

  • You are not integrated in society.

  • Right?

  • You do not commit egoistic suicide when you care about the

  • beloved ones, and you don't want to cause

  • them pain by killing yourself.

  • Right?

  • Anomic suicide happens if people are kind of not

  • sufficiently regulated, and therefore they,

  • in this anomic situation, may commit suicide.

  • Okay, so that's about it.

  • And let me then move on to Durkheim's methodology.

  • >

  • Yes, number twenty-four.

  • So this is The Rules of Sociological Method,

  • published in 1895, two years after The Division

  • of Labor and two years before the Suicide,

  • but foreshadows and combines elements from both.

  • I have a lot of stuff, so I will rush you through.

  • One question is--what he deals with--when is a fact social;

  • when can we talk about social facts?

  • Then he asks how can we observe social facts?

  • Then he makes a distinction between normal and pathological

  • states.

  • He also writes about nominalism and realism, and offers an

  • alternative to nominalism and realism, what is his system of

  • classifications.

  • And then he addresses the issue of the question of explanation

  • and causality--very path breaking ideas in his times.

  • So when is a fact social?

  • And the first point is, well we have to make a

  • distinction between social and biological or psychological

  • phenomena.

  • Well, and then he also--I will elaborate on this.

  • And then he asks the question, how objective are the social

  • facts?

  • The biological facts are obviously objective;

  • psychological, not so obviously; the social, the least so.

  • Why are they still objective?

  • And then he labors on what makes the social facts

  • collective, as such.

  • And that is--of course, education is the major

  • mechanism.

  • Okay, so let's ask the question, what is the social

  • fact, as distinct from biological or psychological?

  • Well he said, "Well, if all facts,

  • what affects human beings, would be regarded as social,

  • there would be no real discipline what should be called

  • sociology."

  • And as I pointed out before--right?--he is the first

  • person who identifies emphatically with the discipline

  • of sociology.

  • He actually has this notion of life sciences,

  • interestingly, right?

  • And sociology is part of life sciences.

  • Right?

  • There are three life sciences: sociology, biology,

  • and psychology.

  • But these three different life sciences deal with different

  • units of analysis, deal with different objects.

  • Right?

  • Biology deals with the body, psychology deals with the

  • personality, while sociology deals--this is

  • his shtick, right?--it deals with

  • collective representations.

  • Right?

  • He tries to move beyond the idea of collective

  • consciousness; collective representation,

  • which somehow objectively embodies, as a fact,

  • the states of collective consciousness.

  • And therefore he said, "This is indeed a set of

  • phenomena I will be able to distinguish with other facts.

  • So when do I act socially?"

  • he asks the question.

  • "I do so when I execute my contract."

  • Right?

  • "I perform duties--right?--which are

  • defined externally to me.

  • Right?

  • If I perform my duties, then I am acting socially;

  • I'm a socially responsible person".

  • Which seems to be--right?--straightforward and

  • obvious.

  • Okay, how objective they are?

  • That's very--at first look it doesn't look too objective,

  • because the sense of obligation seems to be very subjective.

  • Right?

  • You may occasionally say to your partner,

  • "You are irresponsible."

  • Right?

  • By which you mean you don't have enough of a feeling of a

  • duty towards me.

  • Right?

  • So there is this subjective element involved in this.

  • But he said nevertheless we can see this is still objective.

  • And one of the major ways how we can understand it is

  • objective, that in fact there is some

  • external enforcement-- right?--of these obligations,

  • if you keep breaking these obligations,

  • there will be penalties against you.

  • Right?

  • Well not all the time.

  • Occasionally you can get away with it.

  • But at one point there may be punishment.

  • You see others being punished by not fulfilling their duties

  • or obligations, and therefore you can see that

  • it is externally enforced-- it's not just a subjective

  • thing that you think you have duties,

  • right?--it will be externally implemented.

  • So well you have obligations--right?--at 7:00

  • p.m.

  • today to go on the internet and unload questions--right?--and to

  • answer two of them.

  • Well this, of course, will come as subjective

  • feelings of duty in you.

  • It's--have enough guilt feelings if you don't do it in a

  • timely manner, if you would be late--it's

  • sufficiently internalized in you.

  • But you know that there were occasions when people were late

  • with assignments and there were teaching fellows,

  • or professors, who deducted--right?--

  • something from the grades.

  • So therefore you don't want to risk a lower grade.

  • And beyond your deep personal commitment that I want to

  • fulfill my duty in a timely manner--

  • right?--there is also a concern that if I don't,

  • I may get some penalty. Right?

  • So that's what makes it social.

  • Right?

  • Okay, so well it has to be collective.

  • Right?

  • It cannot be just individual.

  • We have a collective sense of obligations, and he uses the

  • term 'habits'.

  • It's a very good term, which I don't think has been

  • used before him so forcefully as Durkheim did--

  • became very widely used more recently following another great

  • French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu,

  • who termed this term habit into a term habitus.

  • Right?

  • Well habit, habitus, mores, manners,

  • ways of life--right?--means that we have something;

  • we know how to navigate in social life.

  • Right?

  • We know how to deal with situations.

  • These are habits, the ways how we behave in

  • social life.

  • And he said, "Where does it come

  • from?"

  • He said this is coming from education.

  • Right?

  • It's you are being educated what you are supposed to do.

  • Well that's not exactly--right?--what Hobbes

  • meant.

  • Hobbes had this idea--right?--of manners and

  • customs, but he believed that these

  • manners and customs simply he could explain from the

  • individual actors.

  • Right?

  • The individuals act and then they know that there will be

  • another, an Alter who will respond.

  • They evaluate what the possible answer of the other will be,

  • and therefore they will learn ways how to navigate,

  • anticipating possible punishment from others.

  • Right?

  • So he, Hobbes, can do it by doing a

  • methodological individualist exercise.

  • Durkheim emphasizes no, this is not how we learn it,

  • through acting and getting punishment and seeing others

  • being punished.

  • It is through the system of education.

  • Now this is a good point, an interesting point.

  • Well and here again--right?--this is kind of

  • crystallized in ways of acting.

  • That's what habit, or in the more contemporary

  • version habitus, is all about.

  • Right?

  • I think Bourdieu also means that habitus is something what

  • you learn and carry in yourself, and depending what your habits

  • or habitus are, will mean how you will fit in

  • different situations.

  • We occasionally think that people get into positions where

  • they don't have the appropriate habitus to behave--

  • right?--and therefore they may not be performing a task very

  • well, because they do not have the

  • proper habits.

  • The habits are kind of internalized earlier in life,

  • and then it helps us to perform different functions in society.

  • Well I have to rush.

  • So how do we observe social facts?

  • And now here it comes.

  • These social facts are things, and what we need is a rigorous

  • discipline--right?--for social analysis.

  • And that also implies that we have to get rid of all of our

  • preconceptions.

  • We have to define the objects of our investigations

  • independently from our values.

  • It's almost a value-free science, what he argues;

  • I will say not quite.

  • And we have to get rid of those data which are too

  • subjective--sort of social facts are things, objects.

  • Well this is a very interesting citation,

  • what you would not expect from Durkheim,

  • to come, and reads almost like Karl Marx in The German

  • Ideology.

  • Right?

  • "The proper science should not proceed from ideas to

  • things, but from things to ideas." Right?

  • It reads almost identical to The German Ideology.

  • But he, of course, means something different.

  • Right?

  • The things are not property relations.

  • Right?

  • The things are actually collective manifestations--

  • right?--collective ideas.

  • So the notion of thing is used here in a very unique and very

  • different way.

  • But what he emphasizes--right?--that they

  • are not the individual ideas, but they are kind of

  • crystallized, and it's out there,

  • over us, like things what we cannot change,

  • individuals cannot really change.

  • And he said well social sciences evolve,

  • just like natural sciences, by getting rid of prejudices--

  • right?--dogmas, to moving beyond dogmas,

  • and substitute them with the study of facts.

  • That's what Bacon, the philosopher--right?--in the

  • seventeenth century suggested; all scientific investigation

  • should start from induction, from the observance of

  • sensually observable facts.

  • So he invokes Bacon--right?--that this is the

  • scientific method.

  • Right?

  • Well it is not necessarily sensuous experience,

  • which is emphasized in Durkheim, but moving beyond

  • preconceptions and dogmas.

  • And he said, "Well the theory should be

  • only introduced when science is sufficiently at an advanced

  • stage."

  • Well this is a very good advice to people who are graduate

  • students and are doing dissertations.

  • Don't start with theory--right?--start by

  • analyzing social facts, and when you're sufficiently

  • advanced, that's when you find the proper theory.

  • When you will be doing your senior thesis,

  • I think it's good advice to take.

  • Right?

  • Don't start with big words, start with actual analysis and

  • find theory when you already have a scientific idea.

  • And here he comes, a strong critique of economists

  • of his time; a critique what some people

  • will say would apply to economists today.

  • He said, "Economists today principally are occupied how the

  • economy ought to work, rather than to understanding

  • how the economy actually works." Right?

  • Paul Krugman just published a little piece in New York

  • Times a couple of weeks ago where he actually accused his

  • own colleagues.

  • He said, "You created this mess"--

  • you know, with the financial markets--

  • "because you were never looking at how the economy

  • really works.

  • You operated how the economy should be working.

  • But we really should be studying how the economy

  • works."

  • So it's an interesting criticism of economics--I mean,

  • not necessarily true for all economists.

  • And it can be debated whether a normative science,

  • which describes how something should operate,

  • is illegitimate.

  • But he certainly takes the idea that it should not be normative.

  • Well we have to get rid of preconceptions.

  • Right?

  • And he said Descartes and Bacon disagreed with each other.

  • Right?

  • As I said, Bacon was the one who said the analysis should

  • start from induction, observing phenomena what we can

  • sensuously study, and then move towards

  • theorizing later on.

  • Descartes was opting for a deductive method.

  • He said, "Well we have to start from general abstractions

  • and then to move to derived hypotheses from these general,

  • and then to move to the facts."

  • This is the difference between Bacon and Descartes.

  • But he said, "But they do agree in one

  • thing, namely that no matter whether

  • your reasoning is inductive-- right?--from observation to

  • theory, or deductive,

  • from theory to observation, they agree that we should get

  • rid of the dogmas; no preconceptions."

  • And he said this is particularly difficult in social

  • sciences because we think we know how society works.

  • We don't necessarily think we need social scientists to tell

  • us how society works.

  • We experience society, and therefore we have an idea

  • how it works.

  • And we have a strong interest how we would want society to

  • work, and if the conception,

  • if the findings, goes against our interest or

  • beliefs, strong sentiments,

  • we tend to disregard it.

  • So it's very difficult to get rid of dogmas in social

  • sciences, because we have an ordinary

  • knowledge-- right?--not scientific but

  • ordinary knowledge-- how society and the economy

  • operates-- right?--and we have an interest

  • as well involved.

  • So very difficult to get rid of our preconceptions.

  • Well he said, "Well yes,

  • because we have very strong sentiments--and that's okay--we

  • should study the sentiments."

  • Sentiments should study as if they were objects.

  • But we should not be led by sentiments.

  • Right?

  • We have to proceed without passion and without prejudices.

  • Well we have to define the objects of our investigation

  • independently from our values, as such.

  • And therefore he said we have to come up with objective

  • definitions of what we are studying.

  • He said, "What is a crime?"

  • He said, "Crimes are social acts which are

  • punished."

  • Therefore I don't have to make a value judgment in defining

  • crime.

  • If I see a society in which certain acts are systematically

  • punished by that society, I can say in this society this

  • is defined as a crime.

  • I may disagree with this.

  • I may say this should not be a crime, but in this society it is

  • a crime.

  • In many societies, for instance,

  • homosexual acts were defined as a crime.

  • In those societies, they were a crime.

  • You can disagree with it, and you should say,

  • "Well, homosexuality should be decriminalized";

  • as it was, fortunately, decriminalized.

  • It's not a crime any longer.

  • Well smoking and selling marijuana is a crime.

  • Right?

  • It is being punished; you can end up in jail.

  • That's a fact.

  • You may think that marijuana should be decriminalized,

  • but the fact that the consumption of marijuana and

  • marketing of marijuana is a crime today in the United States

  • is an objective fact-- right?--and it can be studied

  • by looking at the law and what on earth judges do in this

  • country.

  • Right?

  • So that's his point.

  • It doesn't matter what your values are, what matters what

  • the practices of society are.

  • The same goes for morality.

  • He said, "Well some people will say well they are immoral

  • because they act differently than I do."

  • He said, "No, every society has morality.

  • You have to understand what that morality is,

  • even if it is different from your own morality."

  • Well we have to disregard too subjective informations.

  • This is what scientists do when they use measures and

  • instruments.

  • That's what--he's very much attracted to the scientific

  • reasoning in sociology; it's a very French idea.

  • Well then he makes a distinction between normal and

  • pathological.

  • So what is the difference between normal and pathological?

  • Well he said, "Normal is the most

  • frequent form of action."

  • Right?

  • We need a conception for normality, because we just

  • cannot operate without defining normality.

  • But how can we do that, and at the same time remain

  • objective, when we can say something is abnormal without us

  • making it?

  • He said it's easy, because what we shall do,

  • that we should regard those as normal which is sort of the most

  • common way of act, and to define the extremes as

  • abnormal.

  • And he said the reason for this is that it would be

  • incomprehensible if the most widespread act were not at the

  • same time the most advantageous one.

  • But then he takes it back.

  • He said well we can actually see a number of occasions when

  • frequently behavior, which is frequently followed,

  • is actually not useful.

  • In this case, it may be inherited from the

  • past.

  • It may have been functional at one point of time.

  • The situation changed and people still keep their habit,

  • and they still keep behaving that way,

  • and that can be now defined as abnormal,

  • though it can be probably quite average behavior.

  • Right?

  • Think of racism, for instance,

  • as a good example.

  • Right?

  • Well there is a very interesting argument about

  • crime.

  • He said well crime looks like it is indeed,

  • by definition, pathological.

  • But is it?

  • He said well crime is present in all societies.

  • So when is--he makes this very interesting argument.

  • And therefore really, I think, we are calling crime

  • abnormal if there are too much crime in society.

  • Crime per se is a normal state, as such.

  • Well I think I'll leave this nominalism, realism argument

  • out.

  • We'll put it on the internet.

  • About causality--I'll finish with the idea of causality.

  • He said well the task of social sciences is to explain,

  • not only to describe--to be able to deal with causes and

  • causality.

  • And there are different methods how to do causality.

  • He said in social sciences the typical method is comparative,

  • rather than experimental.

  • In natural sciences we do experiments.

  • In social sciences we can't.

  • Experiment does assume that we assign certain stimuli randomly

  • to a population, and then to see how they

  • respond to this stimulus.

  • We can't do that in society.

  • And as I mentioned about suicide, we cannot assign people

  • to get married and others to assign not to get married,

  • and to study later on what the effect of marriage was in

  • something like suicide.

  • So therefore what we can do is the comparative method.

  • Well I think I'm out of time.

  • He makes a distinction between two types of comparative

  • methods.

  • The comparative methods can be either the method of agreement;

  • a method of agreement if I compare two similar types of

  • societies.

  • For instance, the United States and Canada,

  • and to see whether there is a difference between these two

  • countries.

  • For instance, the level--I have a theory that

  • poverty may be related to crime.

  • People who are hungry are more likely to steal

  • food--right?--because they have to feed themselves;

  • to put it very simply.

  • Now I compare two societies by the level of poverty is the

  • same, and then I will see whether it

  • is indeed poor people are more likely to commit certain type of

  • crimes.

  • Or I can do the method of difference.

  • And the method of difference, if I compare two very different

  • countries.

  • I compare the United States with Bangladesh,

  • where there is a very different rate of crime--

  • right?--and then I see whether there is a difference in crime

  • as such.

  • He said the problem with this method is that there is not

  • enough cases, and therefore the proper

  • method, interestingly he argues, is correlation.

  • What we have to do is to find what the correlations are

  • between two variables.

  • Well this was guiding contemporary social sciences.

  • But Durkheim was smarter than most number crunchers in social

  • sciences, because--here I think the last sentence what I'll show

  • is important.

  • Well you have to make sure that the relationship,

  • what the causal relationship shows, is really causal.

  • Right?

  • "And therefore we shall investigate, by the aid of

  • deduction, how one of the two terms has produced the other

  • one." Right?

  • Today we would say, what Durkheim is suggesting,

  • if you want to establish real causality,

  • short of the possibility of an experimental method,

  • you have to figure out what is the causal mechanism,

  • what relates the two phenomena together,

  • which are statistically correlated to each other.

  • Statistical correlation does not necessarily show that they

  • are--one is causing the other one.

  • Right?

  • You have a theory that the stork brings the baby,

  • and then you test this, and you show that fertility in

  • Scandinavia is low, and there are not many storks.

  • So you have a very strong correlation between number of

  • storks and number of babies being born.

  • This still does not show that--right?--the storks bring

  • the babies.

  • Right?

  • Therefore you have to look at the causal mechanism how babies

  • are being produced.

  • That's basically, I think, a very early,

  • insightful argument by Durkheim's methodology.

  • And that's about it.

  • Thank you.

  • >

  • Prof: Oh thank you.

  • Thanks.

Prof: Okay, now let me--I actually would

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25.杜克海姆與社會事實 (25. Durkheim and Social Facts)

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    黃駿祐 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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