Power: Interpersonal, Organizational, and Global Dimensions Monday, 24 October 2005 TOPIC: How do power differentials arise: Lessons from classical social theory, continued. review of last time: MAX WEBER – Class, Status, and Party distinguishes different ways groups organize on basis of shared lifestyle (status), shared opportunities in market (class), to gain power explicitly (party) – Weber explicitly defined power – Dennis Wrong and other analysts use and develop it – Where do power differential come from? Weber gives no clear answers but argues that the bases of power may differ and vary on social context – may depend on class/status, historical circumstances – his was an empirical inquiry. – In Class, Status, and Party, he encourages us to recognize that power may be sought for a variety of reasons – for enrichment, for own its sake, for symbolic reasons, for status. There are various bases of power and authority – His recognition and description of increasing rationalization of human action suggests that the bases of power may be increasingly located in expert knowledge, ability to understand and manipulate the processes of rationalization. KARL MARX (1818-1883) German, – born to Jewish family that became Protestant in Trier, Rhineland, Germany, just east of – Luxembourg – upper middle class family but spent most of life as outcast from family and Germany Marx’s contributions to social science are enormous. It is difficult to overestimate the consequences of his work in relation to how we think of ourselves, our modern lives, and the present state of world economy, e.g. the resurgence of unregulated capitalism, which was the subject of Marx’s work. 1991 – with the dissolution of USSR, many Marxist scholars (not communists but those who thought that Marx had a persuasive account of social life) thought that Marxism was dead as an interpretive framework, showing how they were more ideological than sociological/theoretical. – why should the USSR matter? Marx wrote an analysis of capitalism, not what the state should be like (that interpretation was Lenin’s doing) – people called themselves Marxists but Marx himself didn’t give a blueprint for a new society Yet, suggest that they were quite wrong and the evidence is persuasive: example, 1992 – major program on national public TV celebrating 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of America; presented a history of global trade routes that had been functioning in 13th/14th/15th centuries; only after this several hour history was Columbus introduced– how he was engaged in looking for new markets for European goods. The standard Columbus account is now an economic account, not about tyranny or a search for freedom – he was employee of the Spanish crown and Italian merchants, a salesman – this was a Marxist account because Marx gives us an account of social relations driven by economics – 10/24/05, page 1 of 9today called neo-liberal capitalism. Marx claims it drives social relations, not individual desire/ will/preferences. Marx was truly an original thinker. He tried to synthesize in a new and critical way the entire legacy of social knowledge that had heretofore been recorded. Marx’s two purposes ● achieve better understanding of human development, of historical change – how history came to be the way it was ● take this understanding of how social relations and human development works, how history develops, and use this to accelerate the actual process by which history developed  Concisely, Marx wanted to understand what constituted the foundations of social life and then use that understanding to engineer it. This dual purpose is essential to understanding what he was about, the nature of his thought, his contributions to social life, and why he had such difficulties as he did. Marx was both a philosopher and a man of action – a rare combination! He was equally committed to understanding the human condition and using this understanding. Praxis = observation/understanding + theorizing + action -Æ new understandingÆchange in theory-Æ test in action… etc. Marx wanted to change life as well as understand it and this caused him trouble his whole life and made him an outcast. He was a journalist who wrote controversial pieces and was exiled from both Germany and France but finally found a home in England. Marx was supported by Friedrich Engels (son of an English mill owner) who co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with him. Marx’s goal to understand ourselves and use that understanding to transform society was a new idea in the 19th century. It fed the social sciences, propelling sociologists (e.g. Auguste Compte and Emile Durkheim). He argued that social science should be used for social transformation. Marx’s main ideas about society ● Human society should be envisioned as a whole, a system in which groups and institutions were interrelated and had to be studied in terms of relationships rather than treated in isolation – how did these subsystems (e.g. law, economy, agriculture, family) work together? ● Societies were inherently mutable, malleable – were changing and could be changed. The change took place not as a linear progression (the “Darwinian” view was developing at same time). Change occurred through contradiction and conflict. – Contradiction and conflict that emerged were vehicles of historical development. – If we observe such contradiction and conflict in large enough numbers of instances, we see a degree of regularity, a pattern, so as to allow the formulation of a general statement. We could have a science of society (similar to Weber), laws of social 10/24/05, page 2 of 9change and the consequences of change.  Concisely, everything is interrelated and change occurs through contradiction and conflict. Like Simmel and Pareto, Marx was looking for essential basic units of social action: lay out his theory using these concepts/ themes:  primacy of work  organization of work  historical materialism (dialectic)  classes and class struggle  wage labor and capitalism  commodity fetishism Marx made the observation that human beings are living organisms requiring sustenance, protection from and harmony with nature and the physical environment. He noticed that this is also true of animals. Humans were different because we are