Politics Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Politics Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The discipline of sociology has generated few outright political classics. One of the sociology classics, Max Weber’s Economy and Society, contributed a great deal to the understanding of political behavior. Yet it is not a political work in the sense that Aristotle’s Politics or Hobbes’ Leviathan is. Economy and Society sometimes hints at but it never enumerates the ”best practical” regime. Aristotle and Hobbes had no doubt that such a regime existed -even if they disagreed about what it was. Weber’s comparison of traditional, charismatic and procedural authority bears a passing resemblance to the comparison of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy perennially made by the great political thinkers, but the resemblance is limited.

The discipline of politics persistently asks ”what is the best type of state?” Answers vary, but the question is constant. The prime object of sociological inquiry is not the state but society. Even Weber, who was politically astute, preferred terms like ”authority” and ”domination” to ”the state.” Sociological categories have a much broader application than expressly political categories like ”democracy” or ”monarchy”. Weber’s discussion of legitimate authority was a major and enduring contribution to understanding the consensual foundations of power, but it did not replace the older and equally enduring topic of political regime. A democracy can be traditional, charismatic or procedural, depending on time and circumstance. Even if we can resolve which one of these types of legitimate authority we favor, and which we think would be most feasible for a country in a given period or situation, larger questions still remain. Is democracy preferable to monarchy or military rule? Which regime – stratocracy or democracy, oligarchy or monarchy – is most compatible with tradition, charisma and procedure?

Sociology is not political science reborn. Yet sociology does have a political resonance, because it emerges out of the disintegration of hierarchical societies. At its core, sociology is an answer to the question: how is society possible without the binding agent of hierarchy? This is a political question insofar as, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all states – whether they were city states, monarchies or empires – were built around social hierarchies. Political forms turned on the social orders of master and servant, noble and commoner, tribute receiver and giver, citizen and free person, slave owner and slave. A threshold was crossed in the late eighteenth century. The traditional social authority of hierarchy started to be replaced. The drive to explain what it was that was replacing hierarchies created sociology. This had a political spin-off. Anyone who tried to explain the post-hierarchical social condition also had to hypothesize about the nature of post-hierarchical states. One of the best hypotheses was Weber’s idea that traditional authority was being replaced by legal-rational authority. This, though, applied as much to the business corporation as it did to the state.

Rational-legal bureaucracy produced its own kind of hierarchy – organizational hierarchy – that was different from traditional social hierarchy. As traditional hierarchies crumbled, organizational ties replaced personal relations as the backbone of state and society. Sociology sometimes ascribed cooperation in these organizations to positive knowledge (Comte) and sometimes to the vocational ethics of the professionals who ran them (Durkheim, Weber). Scientific knowledge and professional norms both eviscerated the loyalty and faith of traditional social orders. Sociology viewed post-hierarchical society as the product of an epochal transition – from metaphysical to positive knowledge, militant to industrial society, consumer to producer society, status to contract, mechanical to organic solidarity, community to society, class to classless society, uniformity to differentiation, producer to consumer society, ascription to achievement, martial to pacific power, local to territorial power, and so on. Each of these models was obliquely political. Each one assumed that the evolution from martial to industrial society also transformed state, law and justice. The end of this transformation was a society that would be just, fair, equal, enlightened or authentic – a goal that sociology was always disappointed never arrived.

Bibliography:

Aristotle (1998) Politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Durkheim, E. (1984) The Division of Labor in Society. Macmillan: Basingstoke.
Comte, A. (1988) Introduction to Positive Philosophy. Hackett, Indianapolis, IN.
Marx, K. (1993) Grundrisse. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.