Q.

USING MAX WEBER CONCEPT OF SOCIAL ACTION AND

EMILE DURKHEIM CONCEPT OF THE SOCIAL FACT. WRITE A
COMMENTARY ON THE UNIQENESS OF SOCIOLOGICAL
WORK.

INTRODUCTION-
Sociology has been defined in number of ways by different scholars. There are as
many definitions of sociology as there are sociologists. To understand more fully what
sociology is about some of its definitions may be cited as follows:

In 1839, Comte defined sociology as the science of human association or the study of
gregarious life. In 1851, he attempted to give more flesh and blood to the said definition in
his work System of Positive Politics. He conceived of sociology as an abstract theoretical
science of social phenomena. According to him it is the business of sociology to discover and
abstract social laws and thereby to explain the social phenomena.

Sociology is the study of groups. According to many sociologists, sociology studies man as a
member of the -group and as a participant in culture. Man is never an individual in isolation.
It has been said that the group is the datum of sociology, not the individual human being.
Sociology studies human beings in their group relations, human behaviour in terms of groups
and groupings.

Durkheim defines social facts as predominantly "things", that is real agents, that
should be at the focal point of the study of society. For Durkheim social facts are
everything of social or cultural nature which work to determine an individual's life.
Social facts can be social norms, values, conventions, rules and other social
structures.

Social facts according to Durkheim exist outside and regardless of the individual
which only works to sustain them by yielding to their power on him . This means that
social facts are external to us, and they are acquired through society of coerced by it.
Deviation from social facts can result in various types of sanctions. They function as
"sui generis" generals, meaning ideas that are independent of their actual private
cases. Social facts are quite simply the things that we like brushing your teeth, voting,
shopping, going to church, paying taxes, yielding to pedestrians and so on and so
forth. None of these things are done on our account, they are done because they are
social facts that must be abided and therefore have real power over you. The way we
manage our lives according to Durkheim is "What is Social Fact?" is always related to
the workings of elaborate networks of social facts.

Durkheim gives the example of suicide rates, found to be higher with protestant
communities compares with catholic ones. The fact that denomination had to do with
suicide was proof for Durkheim to the function of social facts because it
demonstrated how even taking your own life dependant on society rather than
individual choice.   

According to max weber social action is that action of a individual which is Influenced by the
action and behavior of other person and by which its direction is determined. Social action is
action taken with account taken of the past, present or future actions, behaviour, and attitudes
of others. Action that is social as actions to which the ‘acting individual attaches a subjective
meaning to his behaviour— be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is “social”
insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of other and is thereby
oriented in its course’.

 Not all action is social: if it ain't oriented to the behavior of others, it ain't social. Also, it is
not merely action participated in by a bunch of people (crowd action) or action influenced by
or imitative of others. Action can be causally determined by the behavior of others, while still
not necessarily being meaningfully determined by the action of others. If I do what you do
because it's fashionable, or traditional, or leads to social distinction, its meaningful.
Obviously the lines are blurred , but it's important to make a conceptional distinction.

Emile Durkheim and Max Weber are commonly and correctly regarded as two of the
foremost comparative analysts in the history of sociology. In their work they faced a number
of common problems that arise in comparative analysis, and attempted to overcome them in
ways that are still instructive. Both of them, moreover, had occasion during the course of
their careers - Durkheim in 1895 and Weber in 1904 - to produce major theoretical and
methodological statements on the program for sociology. Each statement was incomplete in
many ways; for example, while both theorists assigned comparative sociological analysis a
central place in their programs for sociology, neither developed a detailed, explicit statement
of strategies for comparative analysis. Nevertheless, their reflections, considered together,
expose the major methodological dilemmas encountered in comparative analysis. Their
methodological writings are further instructive in that while they began with methodological
perspectives that were radically opposed to one another, each made a number of significant
modifications of these starting points in the course of his argument. As a result, their practical
programs for sociological investigation - to say nothing of their actual empirical research -
resemble one another much more than their methodological perspectives.
Uniqueness-
Both social fact and social action as the basic concept of Durkheimian and Weberian
sociologies possess the characteristic of being exclusively the object under the scope of
sociology. As the two founding fathers worked to separate sociology from other disciplines,
they did so by identifying the specific set of phenomena that cannot be fully grasped by
theories and methods of natural sciences, philosophy or psychology etc.

I shall now examine what Durkheim and Weber meant by “social” when formulating the
concepts of social fact and social action as the basis of “sociologies” they had in mind. In fact
it is far from coincidence that both of them put “social” in their basic concepts, given the
purpose of separating sociology that has been discussed above. To identify and define the
basic subject matter for sociology, be it either “fact” or “action”, as “social”, is a critical
aspect of their projects. In this sense, “social” has a labeling function for phenomena and
issues that fall under the sociological scope. As discussed above, the two figures have
envisioned quite different routes for sociology as a discipline to follow, and designated
different tasks for sociologists to fulfill. It naturally follows that what Durkheim meant by
“social” is not exactly the same with the Weberian usage of the same word.

In the beginning of the first chapter of The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim put
forward the question of “what are the facts termed ‘social'”. He opposed to the common
usage of the term “social”, which “designate(s) all most all the phenomena that occur within
society”, for the reason that “if therefore these facts were social ones, sociology would
possess no subject matter peculiarly its own, and its domain would be confused with that of
biology and psychology” In a normative manner, for the purpose of isolating a set of
sociological subject matter, Durkheim defined that “social” should be the “distinct
characteristics” of “the clearly determined group of phenomena”. To put in another way,
“social” is used as a label for phenomena suitable only for sociological investigation, just as
Durkheim claimed that “the word ‘social’ has the sole meaning of designating those
phenomena which fall into none of the categories of facts already constituted and labeled.
They are consequently the proper field for sociology.”

Then what are these “distinct characteristics” that are put under the rubric of “social”? What
does the label imply? Durkheim identifies them as the capability of “exerting over the
individual an external constraint”, the nature of being “general over the whole of a given
society” as well as the possession of “an existence of its own, independent of individual
manifestations” In other words, “social” stands in opposition to “individual”; it is external to
and coercive upon the individuals, and at the same time “collective” in the sense that they are
“general throughout society” and “diffused within the group”

Social for Weber, as in the notion of social action, however, is neither “external” nor
“coercive” to individuals. For one thing, Weberian “social” lies within the individual actor
but goes beyond her at the same time: only when subjective attitudes derives from the
individual motivation and orients towards the behaviour of others. For another, individuals as
actors construct “social” through their actions and behaviours, rather than being pressured or
forced by the “social” to act, think or feel in certain ways.

The central feature of “social” as in the term “social action” is perhaps “meaningfully
interactive” on the internal and subjective level. External contact is not necessarily “social”;
as the case proposed by Weber suggests, the collision of two cyclists, although externally
observable, is not social since neither actor’s behavior is meaningfully oriented to that of
others As social action must be “interactive” by intention, religious behavior in the form of
solitary prayer is not social for the lack of orientation towards the behavior of others

The case of religious behavior is perhaps where Durkheim would strongly disagree with
Weber’s contention. Solitary prayer, as long as it is observable to outside, is social in the
sense that it is by nature a way of acting, thinking and feeling “imposed” upon the individual
by the society. Durkheim would probably further argue that solitary prayer is a form of ritual
through which an individual even in its solitude reinforces its belonging to the society

 
Conclusion

Social fact and social action represents two different visions of sociology, with the former
emphasizing the power of social structure and the latter addressing the role of individual
agency. The difference in the theoretical orientation lies under the disparity in methodology,
as well as distinctive stances on certain issues such as religion. The comparison between
these two basic concepts thus can be elaborated in terms of methodology and studies of
certain social phenomena, however due to the limited length this paper shall not go into these
details.

But there is still one thing that begs clarification. No matter how differently Durkheim and
Weber formulate the subject matter of sociology, it is far from the case that they two opposed
to each other in every aspect of argument. Rather they together serve to grasp the dynamics
between social constraint and individual will that we all have experiences of. Though
maintaining the superiority of the social over the individual, Durkheim never degraded
individual action and behavior as non-existent or irrelevant; instead he acknowledged the
interaction between individuals as the premise for a social fact to come into being, Weber
shared with Durkheim the idea that sociology does not rely on psychology of any kinds, and
acknowledged that there is an intermediary realm in between of the “physical” and the
“psychic” that possesses a unique logic of its own–– which is quite similar to Durkheim’s
concept of society sui generis.