Classical Social TheoristsEssay title: Classical Social TheoristsClassical Social TheoristsWhen trying to compare three social theorists to each other, you must first try to understand the intricacies that are entangled within each theory itself. Theorists, by nature, create theories that can be debated from all angles but must be a tight fit in order to be considered applicable to society. Theology as a single entity is constructed from deep intellectual thought. When social theorist begin to develop there theoretical perspectives, they seem to have an overwhelming grasp on the concepts they try to convey to us. Since it is extremely difficult to have such a complete strong hold on social issues such as family, politics and economics, it is important to know and understand the basic principles that underline the theories we study. To compare the theories of Georg Simmel, Vilfredo Pareto, and George Herbert Mead, I will first discuss the basic strengths and weaknesses of their theories.
Simmel was a conflict theorist who sought to investigate “pure or formal sociology” by trying to understand the societal forms themselves. Pure sociology refers to the investigation of the forms of interaction that underlie political, economic, religious, and sexual behaviors. Simmel was inspired by social differentiation and he was interested in the change that urbanization, industrialization brought to society (Li, Lecture). Unlike the work of Mead and Pareto, Simmel’s theories were non traditional and his topics varied throughout societies many issues. Simmel thought that by focusing on the basic properties of interaction, per se, that sociology could discover the underlining processes of social reality (Turner, P.265).
Simmel’s web of group affiliations is a sociological analysis of how patterns of group participation are altered with social differentiation and the consequences of such alterations for people’s everyday behavior (Turner P. 268). People become attached to certain groups because of similarities of talents, inclinations and activities and other factors of which they have some control. Simmel first talked about this in his social differentiation which is seen by most as not being very use full in its early stages.
Simmel saw society as Sociation /Association. He was interested in how people get connected. He saw society as a web of intricate multiple relations between individuals. He said society was merely a name for a number of individuals associated by interaction (Li, Lecture).
Simmel saw positive functions of conflict in the development of society. He said that competition forces people to establish ties with one another in a web of affiliation, and in groups, conflict increases the degree of social solidarity within each group and at the same time, decreases the level of tolerance for deviance.
Aside from seeing conflict as a social form, Simmel also saw money as a social form. Simmel’s Philosophy of Money is a stab at exposing how the forms of interaction affect the basic nature of social relations independently of their specific content.
Simmel’s major contribution to sociology resides in his concern with the basic forms of interaction. Unlike Mead and Pareto, Simmel is hard to follow because he jumps from topic to topic, from the micro to the macro and from the historical past to contemporary situations in his time. But in the end, his goal is similar to all other theorists: to explain many empirical events with a few highly abstract models and principles. (Turner P. 287)
Although he rejected many of the points of positivist doctrines, Vilfredo Pareto was somewhat of a positivist whose major contribution to sociology was his Circulation of Elites conspiracy theory documented in The Rise and Fall of the Elites. Also known as the Father of Mathematics, Pareto thought that economics limited itself to a single aspect of human action and therefore, devoted his studies to social theory. Pareto also thought that human affairs were largely guided by non logical, non traditional actions, or what he called “sentiments” (Li, Lecture). In Pareto’s view, all human behavior is one of six instinctive drives which is seen by some as being just awkward terminology being used to emphasize a simple analytical and empirical point that human behavior is motivated in basic directions.
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An early part of the book, titled “The Case for Theory of Moral Sentiments,” describes how a social theory that is both practical and socially accepted was developed as a method for analyzing the way humans are reacting to the world around them. It was, in addition to looking at human behavior, also looking at what makes the world work. In the early 1980s, the early psychologists Lawrence Bell and Jonathan H. Adler developed a theory that included a group of cognitive biases, theories which were eventually developed as the basis for theory of moral judgments and behavior with a critical view of human psychology.
Pareto’s concept of moral sentiment is largely based on the idea that humans are naturally happy — they actually have a lot of that happiness, but not nearly as much it would be if we chose to enjoy it. For this reason, Pareto theorizes the concept has been put forward as a “sociological system of sentiment” which is based on a set of intuitions that are not necessarily rooted in reality but that are, in fact, connected to what we believe we are doing in practice.
While Pareto’s “scientific model” is not a scientific model, his hypothesis is based on a set of normative judgments which was essentially based on logic, reasoning, and intuition. According to Pareto, this means this is, in large part, a set of moral judgments and behavior that we will follow to understand moral behavior, but ultimately it isn’t.
And in Pareto’s view, the real meaning of a moral being is often not what it seems, it is what it says. Being is what makes something important, and in most cases not what it thinks it is, but how it looks. Thus, he maintains that we may be doing one or more of the following things that makes one person something that is useful to both of us (like the man in the painting):
It was in general the case that the man, who was on welfare, did not have much power to influence his character or to influence what he liked or disliked about others (whether he did it or not), but that he was also able to affect the way that others thought about that individual in a positive way.
If we can get a sense of how things are being shown to us the way they ought to be — if we can see that how our self-image or who we think are perceived is a lot of things — what’s important is not how an individual is perceived but how we can relate to that individual. An example of such a value being “given” might be a woman’s perception of her relationship with her husband during their marriage. When you see that relationship, your perceptions of that relationship reflect that one’s perceived role as a protector and good provider and not as a person of the kind she thought he or she should be.
In other words, because you don’t want other people to view you as this person in a positive way, you might instead regard them as someone who is a bad person who didn’t share your relationship and that they didn’t do right
Pareto’s theory of social change suggests that society is a system of forces in equilibrium. The logic being that prolonged movement in one direction tends to generate countervailing pressures, which at first half, and then reverse, the direction of change.
His Circulation of Elites is a fascinating conspiracy theory that says at any time political processes are dominated by elites whose members are either lions or foxes, using either force co-optation as methods of social control. Correspondingly, economic processes are dominated by elites, whose members are either rentiers