Karl Marx (18181883) Was a German philosopher, economist,sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary

socialist. Father of the social conflict theory.

The most important concepts of Karl Marx
The following concepts of Marx have aided sociological thought significantly;
Dialectical Materialism- (adopted as the official philosophy of the Soviet communists) that political and
historical events result from the conflict of social forces and are interpretable as a series of contradictions
and their solutions. The conflict is believed to be caused by material needs.
Materialistic Interpretation of History i.e Historical Materialism-Historical Materialism is a theory
that privileges the economic in explanation of non-economic phenomena. It is sometimes known as
the materialist conception of history or the economic interpretation of history. It was the research
program of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx himself never used the term.
Class and Class conflict-Class conflict, frequently referred to as class warfare or class struggle, is the
tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests and desires
between people of different classes.
Alienation-Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (German: Entfremdung) of people
from aspects of their human nature (Gattungswesen, species-essence) as a consequence of living in a
society stratified into social classes.
David mile Durkheim (1858 1917) Was a French sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher.
"SOCIOLOGY MUST NOT BE A SIMPLE ILLUSTRATION OF READY-MADE AND DECEPTIVE
TRUISMS; IT MUST FASHION DISCOVERIES WHICH CANNOT FAIL TO UPSET ACCEPTED
NOTIONS." 1909
IDEAS DEVELOPED PRIOR TO 1888
I. SOCIOLOGY AS SCIENCE OF MORAL LIFE
A. USE OF ORGANIC ANALOGY
1. SOCIETY COMES PRIOR TO INDIVIDUAL
2. SOCIETY AS SOMETHING BEYOND EVERY PERSON
3. PRODUCTION OF COLLECTIVE CONSCIENCE
AS DURKHEIM STATES, "THE TOTALITY OF BELIEFS AND SENTIMENTS COMMON TO AVERAGE
CITIZENS OF THE SAME SOCIETY FORMS A DETERMINATE SYSTEM WHICH HAS ITS OWN LIFE;
ONE MAY CALL IT THE COLLECTIVE OR COMMON CONSCIENCE." ... "IT IS, IN EFFECT,
INDEPENDENT OF THE PARTICULAR CONDITIONS IN WHICH INDIVIDUALS ARE PLACED; THEY
PASS ON AND IT REMAINS." (PAGE 79-80 THE DIVISION OF LABOR IN SOCIETY.)
4. INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE CONSCIENCE WILL DIFFER
5. SOCIETY IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS THIS IS UNIQUE SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION
6. SOCIOLOGY IS TO STUDY THE MORAL RULES AS PART OF THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION.
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber (1864-1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, jurist,
and political economist.
The social action theory was founded by Max Weber. There are two main types of sociological theories; the
first is the structural or macro theory while the other is social action, interpretive or micro perspectives. At
the two ends of the argument as to which is a better theory are Durkheim, the founding father of
functionalism, and Weber, the mastermind behind social action theory.

Structuralism is a top-down, deterministic perspective that examines the way in which society as a whole
fits together. Functionalism and Marxism are both structuralist perspectives: as such, they both perceive
human activity as the result of social structure.
In social action theory, Weber believes that bureaucratic organisations are the dominant institutions in
society. Weber believes that bureaucracies (institutions) consist of individuals carrying out rational social
actions designed to achieve the goals of bureaucracies. Weber views the whole development of modern
societies in terms of a move towards rational social action. Thus, modern societies are undergoing the
process of rationalization.
Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard
Universityfrom 1927 to 1973.
Social Order. Much like Durkheim, Parsons was concerned with the problem of social order, "how, if
individuals were really separate entities pursuing their self-interest, there could be any order at all: How
could there be anything but disorder?"
Theory. The sociology of Parsons was primarily theoretical, with little empirical content. Rather, Parsons
wrote several long theoretical treatises, integrating concepts and theories from the classical sociologists with
his own ideas and interpretation. Unlike Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, Parsons does not lay out a
methodology for the study of sociology or the social sciences. Instead, he attempted to build large
theoretical framworks which dealt with concepts from all the social sciences.
Robert K. Marton (1910-2003) was an American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching
atColumbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor.
Merton's structural-functional idea of deviance and anomie. Merton's theory on deviance stems from his
1938 analysis of the relationship between culture, structure and anomie. Merton defines culture as an
"organized set of normative values governing behavior which is common to members of a designated
society or group".
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher.
His contribution to theoretical debate within Marxism generally is marked by three texts: For Marx, Lenin
Philosophy and Reading Capital. The first two are collections of essays, the third is an examination
of Capital presented in a seminar at Ecole Normale Superieure in 1965.

and

Broadly speaking , Althusser's contribution to Marxist thought comprises

(i) the drawing of ' a line of demarcation between Marxist theory and the forms of philosophical
subjectivism that have
compromised or threatened it, and
(ii) the identification of an epistemological break between the early Marx and the late Marx, which enables
the true theoretical bases of the Marxist science of history to be demonstrated in contrast to the pre-Marxist
idealist notions on which depend contemporary interpretations of Marxism as 'a philosophy of humanism'.
Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf (1929-2009) was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and
liberal politician.
A class conflict theorist, Dahrendorf was a leading expert on explaining and analyzing class divisions in
modern society, and is regarded as "one of the most influential thinkers of his generation."[1] Dahrendorf
wrote multiple articles and books, his most notable being Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959)
and Essays in the Theory of Society (1968).

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts

a. Communication and Mind

In Mind, Self and Society (1934), Mead describes how the individual mind and self arises out of the social
process. Instead of approaching human experience in terms of individual psychology, Mead analyzes experience
from the "standpoint of communication as essential to the social order." Individual psychology, for Mead, is
intelligible only in terms of social processes. The "development of the individual's self, and of his selfconsciousness within the field of his experience" is preeminently social. For Mead, the social process is prior to
the structures and processes of individual experience.
Mind, according to Mead, arises within the social process of communication and cannot be understood apart
from that process. The communicational process involves two phases: (1) the "conversation of gestures" and (2)
language, or the "conversation of significant gestures." Both phases presuppose a social context within which
two or more individuals are in interaction with one another.

b. Action
For Mead, mind arises out of the social act of communication. Mead's concept of the social act is relevant, not
only to his theory of mind, but to all facets of his social philosophy. His theory of "mind, self, and society" is, in
effect, a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of a social process involving the interaction of many
individuals, just as his theory of knowledge and value is a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of the
experiencing individual in interaction with an environment.
There are two models of the act in Mead's general philosophy: (1) the model of the act-as-such, i.e., organic
activity in general (which is elaborated in The Philosophy of the Act), and (2) the model ofthe social act, i.e.,
social activity, which is a special case of organic activity and which is of particular (although not exclusive)
relevance in the interpretation of human experience. The relation between the "social process of behavior" and
the "social environment" is "analogous" to the relation between the "individual organism" and the "physicalbiological environment" (Mind, Self and Society 130).

c. Self and Other

The Self as Social Emergent
The self, like the mind, is a social emergent. This social conception of the self, Mead argues, entails that
individual selves are the products of social interaction and not the (logical or biological) preconditions of that
interaction. Mead contrasts his social theory of the self with individualistic theories of the self (that is, theories
that presuppose the priority of selves to social process). "The self is something which has a development; it is
not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the
given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that
process" (Mind, Self and Society135). Mead's model of society is an organic model in which individuals are
related to the social process as bodily parts are related to bodies.
The self is a reflective process i.e., "it is an object to itself." For Mead, it is the reflexivity of the self that
"distinguishes it from other objects and from the body." For the body and other objects are not objects to
themselves as the self is.
It is perfectly true that the eye can see the foot, but it does not see the body as a whole. We cannot see our
backs; we can feel certain portions of them, if we are agile, but we cannot get an experience of our whole body.

There are, of course, experiences which are somewhat vague and difficult of location, but the bodily
experiences are for us organized about a self. The foot and hand belong to the self. We can see our feet,
especially if we look at them from the wrong end of an opera glass, as strange things which we have difficulty
in recognizing as our own. The parts of the body are quite distinguishable from the self. We can lose parts of the
body without any serious invasion of the self. The mere ability to experience different parts of the body is not
different from the experience of a table. The table presents a different feel from what the hand does when one
hand feels another, but it is an experience of something with which we come definitely into contact. The body
does not experience itself as a whole, in the sense in which the self in some way enters into the experience of
the self (Mind, Self and Society 136).
Herbert George Blumer (1900 1987) was an American sociologist whose main scholarly interests were
symbolic interactionism and methods of social research.
Believing that individuals create social reality through collective and individual action, he was an avid
interpreter and proponent of George Herbert Meads social psychology, which he labelled 'symbolic
interactionism'. Blumer elaborated and developed this line of thought in a series of articles, many of which were
brought together in the book Symbolic Interactionism. An ongoing theme throughout his work, he argued that
the creation of social reality is a continuous process. Blumer was also a vociferous critic
of positivistic methodological ideas in sociology.